FileMaker package teaches Kiwi educators a lesson

When Kent Lendrum, a Kiwi secondary school computer studies teacher, created a FileMaker database in 1999 to help run his classes at Mt Maunganui College, little did he imagine that a decade later he'd be supplying hundreds of New Zealand schools with his comprehensive FileMaker-based school administration package.

At first, his database was a just a mark-book with reporting. As other educators started using it, additional features were added.

KAMAR is the result, a student management system (SMS) developed specifically for the New Zealand school market and, as a Ministry of Education accredited solution, totally tailored to support the NZ Qualifications Authority and our NCEA educational standards. A boon to busy teachers, KAMAR assists schools in day-to-day recording and reporting of student information.

The Ministry provided a subsidy to help schools purchase any accredited student management system, or to help those schools which already have an accredited system purchase additional material for professional development.

Skipping back to a decade ago, in a short time all the teachers in his school were using the customised FileMaker database, saving precious time and streamlining workloads.

Then teachers from other schools started asking about it. The system migrated into a few other schools and, in 2005, Kent went for Ministry accreditation, which required a leap of faith as he and his partner (who still does the KAMAR accounts) had just had their first child and it meant going part-time teaching to pay the bills.

MoE accreditation is a laborious process, but once it was achieved, teaching was over for Kent. Just a year later, 81 NZ schools were using KAMAR, which due to its reliability and the many small options available throughout the application for customisation, can be rapidly adapted for different schools' needs.

Now over 150 New Zealand Schools, from Kaitaia to Invercargill, use KAMAR to manage rolls of 30 students up to the big colleges of over 2500 students and 150-plus staff. KAMAR handles administration, including student and caregiver details, pastoral, attendance, health, ministry returns, staff details, student and class lists.

There are subject, teacher and global mark-books for recording student results including NCEA/NZQA, PATs, STAR, Curriculum Objectives, Key Competencies, AsTTle, SEA and Burt ... plus the ability to design your own assessments.

Reports can include comments, attitudes and attendance information. These are linked with student results, extracurricular activities, awards and other achievements, all linked to produce student reports for printing, pdf, email, or on the web.

But that's not all - other features include Timetabling, Pastoral, Nurse, Groups, Awards, Printing, Fees, Events Planner, Resource Booking, Daily Notices, Equipment, Keys, Home Client ... and more.

Kent has two people permanently on the road training school staff, and four in the Tauranga office (with another about to come on board). He still does a lot of the development work himself, along with a junior developer who helps out on the help desk during peak times.

About 90 per cent of the development work is done on Macs, with a Windows-based server running. Kent jokes that he 'was the last one in the company to go MacIntel' but he sounds a pretty convinced Mac user.

He also swears by Apple's Time Capsule wireless backup system, by the way, which had hourly, weekly and monthly backups, including one just 20 minutes before his wife's MacBook hard drive failed a few days ago.

A big change for KAMAR was going from FileMaker 6 to FileMaker 9 last year, skipping a couple of versions completely. Then KAMAR had to migrate its schools over. This is never easy, but Kent told me the new developer tools in FM9 really help the KAMAR solution to do a better job and it's been a positive experience. He says the schools have largely gone over to FM9 now too. NZ secondary schools turning to KAMAR has slowed a little, so he's evaluating the Primary sector.

The beauty of KAMAR being based on FileMaker means it's pretty fast to get to grips with. But you can't just put a software solution out there and expect teachers to grapple with it themselves. They're too busy and time is precious and besides, they're teachers - not all of them are tech-heads by any means.

Kent, as a former teacher, knows this well, so the KAMAR schools are invited together for an annual meeting which provides an update of KAMAR as a business and outlines future developments. A series of information, training and discussion workshops take place and users of KAMAR meet and network, leading to more development opportunities for Kent and his Tauranga team.

FileMaker is an extremely comprehensive database solution, and while the firm is a fully owned subsidiary of Apple, FileMaker is available for Windows and Mac. That means that KAMAR clients can be running Microsoft Windows XP (SP2) or Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later. Servers can be Microsoft Server 2003 or Mac OS X Server 10.4.2 or newer.

You can read about KAMAR at the company site - a free trial version of KAMAR is available on request for your school.

It's great to see a local software developer growing something like this in New Zealand. I'm always interested in IT developments as they effect our schools. And Kent's not resting on his laurels: he reckons the next logical step is developing a solution for Australia ...

- Mark Webster mac.nz