Summary: Data dashboards

THIS IS SUPER BASIC AND MINIMAL SO FAR!!

Documenters: please use these categories to organize your documentation. Please see the drafted Parent connector network page for explanation of each category. See Vision for OneVille documentation for more discussion of what we hope the final wiki will look like and accomplish!

Summary

(Note to documenters: In this summary, quickly tell the reader a, b, and c:

a. Communication we set forth to improve. (What aspect of communication did we set forth to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?)

b. Main communication improvement(s). (What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?)

c. Main communication realization. (What's your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

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Teacher, parents, principal, and afterschool staff at the Healey School (K-8) have been working together to create a multilingual online dashboard for quick check-ins on student progress toward standard benchmarks. This includes an online family report card (that also supports tutors) and an administrator/teacher data view.

Our hope is that the OneVille Online Family Report Card can work to close crucial and persistent communication gaps among families, teachers, and afterschool providers. (LINK TO THE NEW VISIONS STUFF HERE, ETC., FROM THAT REPORT LAST SUMMER)

This dashboard – a free tool for schools -- presents data such as attendance, grades, MCAS and MAP test scores and growth, and teacher comments. In addition, unlike other one-way data displays, the tool provides a space for family, teacher, and providers to communicate about homework, long-term assignments, demonstration of skills, and social-emotional development. Google Translate assists with translation.

Viewers can message the teacher through the dashboard's comment/question boxes. In our final development, we are supporting an email interface where parents, teachers, and afterschool staff can talk about goals for/progress on student achievement;

Parents are encouraged to shape their conversation around Somerville's existing rubrics for student achievement, also making them more attuned to those rubrics.

[TBD: SCREEN SHOTS HERE OR LATER?]

We wanted to make some tools that were free, so that people could share basic "data" on young people's progress. So did Somerville.

We designed a administrator's data view with administrators, teachers, and service providers and a family report card with teachers, families, and students.

The software can already be adapted for anywhere in the country, but we built the tools to connect to Somerville's student information system and report card. Our next task would be to make these adaptable anywhere in the country.

(COLORED TEXT BOX: Here's ONE MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: improving data sharing in education is in part about ensuring that all necessary stakeholders are aware of students' most basic situation. holes in data = holes in student service. So, standardized benchmarks and key indicators are crucial, but they never show "the whole child": it's just one form of data needed to support young people. And, just "getting data" on a student is never enough: people need to then converse about how the yong person is doing and how they might be assisted.

Communication we set forth to improve

Say more. What aspect of communication did we want to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?

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Oneville's goal is to enable diverse supporters to collaborate in student success using commonplace, low cost, and open source tech. In two years of groundwork supported by the Ford Foundation, we’ve started to develop a full toolkit of free, open source, transferable communication tools and strategies linking diverse partners in public education.

We know from research that to support young people’s success, key supporters in young people’s lives need to share and access necessary information about young people’s progress and experience, and about available resources and opportunities. But the communication infrastructure of public education is shockingly antiquated. Across the country, for example, principals serving low-income children remain unable to quickly view and sort basic information on the children they serve; data is often kept in paper folders. Immigrant parents remain totally unaware of basic information about their children’s progress. Tutors and teachers serving high-need students rarely communicate about what students need to work on. Parents, teachers, and students only sporadically exchange information on young people's basic progress – even while youth use technologies to communicate constantly with one another.

All this, in an era when technology should make basic information-sharing in education easier than ever.

Oddly, we offer the least communication infrastructure to communities with the highest communication needs. Communities able to invest in high-end communication infrastructure just buy expensive tools to help them view and sort their data. What about districts that can't afford this? They keep basic data in drawers; they send requests for data sorting to central administrators, and wait. Or, young people just fall "through the cracks" -- a gap in basic information and response.

In Somerville, parents can log into X2, the student information system, but many don't have passwords or don't know they have them, or forget them. Once they get to X2, it isn't translated for non-English speakers. And, it can be hard for people to quickly digest. It also doesn't show trends over time: for example, X2 doesn't show test score growth. Test scores are kept in chronological order and since students take many tests, it is hard for teachers to see growth on a single test from year to year.

The principal was never able to easily sort any of his data; it required sending queries to a central office and waiting to get charts returned.

Most tools for data display in schools cost districts a lot of money, and they aren't designed by educators or parents. Our open source dashboard is designed to help teachers, administrators, parents, and tutors communicate about students' progress toward standard benchmarks. The goal was to create a translated display easily understandable by an immigrant parent. We also wanted to make sure that parents could communicate back about data, to teachers -- and that tutors, teachers, and parents could over time communicate with one another. Most displays of data in schools are one way only, from teacher to parent.

Process

How we realized and redirected things, over time.

Basic History

The groundwork needed to support the current work.

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eg Nadeau, Somerville resident, had already made an Excel spreadsheet the year before we began work on the dashboard. We did some handywork (participant observation in data drudgery!) to get new data like afterschool enrollment onto his spreadsheet and to consider the new "fields" for data that needed to be created permanently in the district student information system (e.g., enrollment and attendance in afterschool programs, which such programs weren't keeping in Somerville's core data system, X2.) SomerPromise, the Mayor's new Children's Zone-like initiative, was also interested in standard data display, particularly the administrative view and the ability to show data on afterschool programs.

We built on tools already under construction in the District. We made Somerville's K-6 report card (typically handed out on paper) online and color-coded, and added the ability for parents to write back to teachers, in their language, about their reactions (we encouraged use of Google Translate to translate basic material in order to prompt further communications).

Josh Wairi, a 5th grade teacher at the Healey, got interested in the dashboard design when we stopped by his classroom in xxxx. Looking together at his computer and printouts, we realized he was already creating spreadsheets of student data from X2. He was interested in quickly displaying and sorting basic data, to supplement his face to face and phone conversations with students and parents.

Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!

Over the course of the project, we had the following communication and implementation ahas, and project turning points. To read the full accounting, see main article: Dashboard/ahas

Findings/Endpoints

Please describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion!

Concrete communication improvements

What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?

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The admin dashboard and family report card views are now complete. In the fall, we plan to test the report card with our teacher Josh and to shape an email-based communication among the "team" around each student in his class. We plan to support administrators to use the admin view and we'll tweak its sorting and graphing capabilities as needed.

Main communication realizations and implementation realizations

What is your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? (Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

What is your main realization about implementing these innovations in education?

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MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: Getting "basic data" in key people's hands is often not done - and it's crucial. Of course, this basic data is never the whole child and we should always treat such data as "shallow" versions of who students actually are. See eportfolio for other crucial forms of info about youth! But nobody in this day and age should be kept in the dark about basic progress info on young people in their lives!

And districts shouldn't pay big money for seeing and sorting this data, either. Basic, free tools can help.

RELATED COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: the goal is not just to "share data" ias if a tube is dumping data on recipients. The point is that people who share young people have to communicate about data -- to ask questions of each other, share the backstory behind the numbers, and generally keep each other "aware." So, we can't just share numbers through one-time data displays -- we have to enable running communication between people.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Overall, we’ve learned that parents, students, and administrators can fundamentally help design tools for sharing and communicating about basic data in schools. Why do we include them so rarely in design?

Technological how-tos

Describe "how to" use every tool you used, so that others could do the same. Describe "how to" make every tool you made!

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Things we’d expand/do differently

If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!

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-Consider how and whether people can see basic "data" on young people's progress when they need to. Can everyone who needs to get and share that important progress information, get and share it? If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?

-How could low cost tech support such information-sharing, so that districts don't spend huge money on getting basic data in front of people?

-What infrastructure would support actual conversations about "data," between the people who share young people?