February 2-4

Monday: 1:25-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:00
Wednesday: 12:23-2:30

     On Monday of this week, I had a meeting with the instructional tech staff about the use of Office 365 and the continued planning of the student tech team. Office 365 will be implemented for students so that they can use Microsoft Word and other applications at home even if they have not bought it for their own computers. This way, the quality of work from students will not depend on their ability to purchase software. Office 365 will also allow students to easily transfer documents from their home computers to their school computers and back. Finally, Office 365 will soon be able to link with the Moodle accounts of students, which will make all of the software teachers are encouraged to use more smoothly integrated. Additionally, an advertisement for applications to the tech team was aired on the announcements, and the application deadline will be extended because of it. After the meeting, I returned to my adviser's room to finish up the remaining issues with the italc software-mainly the two computers that the software did not download onto properly.
     For the next two days, my colleague and I worked on the app development and the data scraping for the background of the app. We started with deciding upon and downloading the necessary software to easily data scrape. We are planning on using BeautifulSoup with Python to make our scraping algorithms. Next, we had to find the patterns in the sites we wanted to scrape so that we could consistently scrape all of the necessary data in future years. We came upon a problem here: the first thing we decided to scrape was the school newspaper. The PDF's of the paper were all stored in one place, but the sequence of the url's that led to each issue had no pattern at all. So, we had to find another way to get the issues without knowing the url that led to it, but we also had to make sure that we got every available issue every year.