This is exciting beyond words.

From Tom Hoffman:

The SchoolTool 2008 budget finished working its way through the complex SchoolTool bureaucracy this morning (that is, Mark replied to the email I sent him Monday night). So now I guess it’s "official" that SchoolTool and the Science Leadership Academy will be working together in 2008. I put "official" in quotes because the complex SLA bureaucracy pretty much consisted of hanging out in Chris’s office for an afternoon and buying Marcie lunch.

What this entails specifically is SchoolTool (i.e., Mark) paying Alan Elkner to act as "programmer in residence" at SLA from January to December, turning the increasingly close to ready SchoolTool into Chris’s "Killer App." SLA is the perfect site for this, since Chris not only knows what he wants and wants the right things, but he can often pull up an example of something he wrote 10 years ago that did it (but isn’t portable, not to mention unit tested, i18n aware, etc). The key was Alan Elkner, who was working on CanDo, moving from DC to Philly. We’ve found you really need a local developer, and once we had that, things clicked into place.

This is a big piece of the puzzle for us. I’ve written about "The Killer App" before, and every day that goes by, I see it being more and more necessary. We’ve got a chance to built it at SLA… and best, it’s all going to be open source and sharable.

Think about it… an integrated school information server / course management / school publication / library catalog service.

One login. One place to change accounts. One-stop-shopping. Create that… suppliment with the GoogleTools… and what could our students do?