Summary: Data dashboards

Teacher, parents, principal, and afterschool staff at the Healey School (K-8): have been working together to create a multilingual online dashboard (online family report card and administrator data view, for quick check-ins on student progress).

This 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.

History

Greg Nadeau, Somerville resident, had already made an Excel spreadsheet the year before we began work on the dashboard. We did some handywork to get new data onto his spreadsheet and to consider the new "buckets" for data that needed to be displayed (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 initiative, was also interested in standard data display, particularly the administrative view and the ability to show data on afterschool programs.

We made Somerville's K-6 report card (typically handed out on paper) online, and added the ability for parents to write back to teachers, in their language, about their reactions.

Josh Wairi, a 5th grade teacher at the Healey, got interested in the dashboard design when we stopped by his classroom in xxxx; 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.

The OneVille Online Family Report Card works to close crucial and persistent communication gaps among families, teachers, and afterschool providers. 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, 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 each other through the dashboard's comment/question boxes. This allows parents, teachers, and afterschool staff to collaboratively set goals for student achievement, in partnership with students themselves.

Communications made possible

IMAGE HERE FROM PPT:

Parents typically do not see test scores and attendance on a regular basis. They can log into X2, the information system, but many don't have passwords or don't know they have them, or forget them.

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.

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

We are working toward having teachers, tutors, and parents able to communicate on a running basis, with translation from Google. See this mockup: xx