Education Users

[Janice Williamson]

I'm looking for anyone out there who uses Alpha or Access at a
University collecting Teacher Education data. We are looking at
upgrading and are looking at our options. We currently use
Alpha 4 V 6.2 (DOS based).

We track student admission, practicum and student teaching experiences,
and licensing. It has developed over the years into a very complex
array of sets and databases which I am told would take lots of
money to develop in other applications.

[smtobias]

RE: Education Users

Hi, Janice,

I just came across your post and decided to respond. I spent 5-1/2 years working for the School of Education at St. Mary's College of California. While there, I created databases for tracking student teacher placements. These included databases for our students, master teachers, schools, school districts, college supervisors and placement. These were all tied together in a relational system so that, into the placement form/database, we would pull the student information from the student file, the school and district information from the school file, the master teacher information from the teacher file, and the supervisor information from the supervisor file. We had complete demographic information on the schools we used and created a school directory for our students which included all of that information as well as the name address, phone numbers, principal's name and total enrollment. Our students were required to find their own placements which then were approved by our placement coordinator. Included in the system were form letters mailed to the master teacher and principal prior to the placement and a thank you letter to the master teacher at the end of the term. Our contracts with school districts were printed from the district file. Various reports were designed to provide information. At the end of the year, we held a job fair and I built into the system a way of assigning appointments for our students with the various district representatives for interviews. Listings of those interviews were then provided to the districts and to the individual students.

I was also asked to set up a system for tracking the progress of our Masters students through that program. I created a database with fields for indicating the chair, reader, approval date, thesis filing date, and when and if requisite courses were passed. It also included information about the degree they were seeking, since we offered several different emphases.

These were all accompanied by easy to follow choices from menus.

I left Saint Mary's at the end of 1999 to begin a business as an Alpha Software consultant and database system developer. I would be happy to create something similar for your institution if you still need it. Feel free to contact Kathy Crane, the Multiple Subject Placement Coordinator at Saint Mary's College, for more information about me and the systems I created there. She can be reached by email at [email protected] or by phone at (925) 631-4482.