Back in February 2009, Christian Schools of Florida put their Master In-Service Program — which handles ongoing teacher training — on their web site. But we left for later the report required by the state Department of Education summarizing points accrued for each component. That report is now up and running.

The Christian Schools of Florida’s Master In-Service Program manages the activities undertaken by its members to be re-certified as educators. Each in-service activity qualifies for credit towards a component set by the Florida State Department of Education. The new report summarizes the various types of participants — teachers, administrators and non-certificated people — who gain credit towards each component.

In previous years the report was compiled manually. This year however, since all participants in all activities are now entered into CSF’s MIP web system by individual school in-service administrators, the report is simply a print-out of a web page on the CSF site that’s a precise replica of the handwritten paper report. With over 500 teachers participating in almost 100 activities this year, the automatically-generated report has saved a lot of tedious, repetitive and error-prone manual calculations.

The report has two views: a summary, which is sent to the DoE, and the full details view, which drills down to the level of individual participants and shows how the summary’s totals are calculated. The report also generates warnings, such as when an activity has been assigned more hours than its component’s maximum.

The totals are not stored on the server, but instead are calculated each time the page is loaded. Some of this is done client-side using Javascript with the Numeric and Calculation jQuery plugins.

“Thank you for your good work,” CSF president Ken Wackes emailed at the conclusion of the job. “We are greatly satisfied.”