Six projects

Six diverse working groups of innovators of all ages have been testing and designing tools and strategies to help diverse supporters attend closely to the development of each young person (1, 2, 3), and to help people share information, ideas, and resources across schools (4) and the community (5, 6).

All of the tech used is free/low-cost and for the most part, open source (meaning that anyone can have the software and adapt it). We’ve built new tools (our dashboards and hotline) only when we found no free tool available to test.

Here’s what we’ve all accomplished together:

1. Teacher, parents, and administrators at the K-8 Healey School have been working with local technologists to design open source data dashboards, to support educators, families, tutors, and service providers to communicate about students’ progress toward standardized benchmarks. We've made an administrator data view, a teacher classroom view, and, an individual view supporting “teams” of teachers, families, and afterschool providers to discuss student progress. Our next step: pilot the dashboards in fall 2011 with the principal, teachers, and “teams” and develop the views to support users’ everyday discussions.

2. Teachers and students at Somerville High have been innovating ePortfolios using free software, to support youth, teachers, and mentors to communicate about individual students’ full range of skills, learning interests, and learning experiences. We supported work SHS was already interested in doing -- transitioning paper portfolios to online ones that could show the skills of students across the curriculum. ePortfolio use is now expanding schoolwide!

3. Teachers and students at Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville's alternative high and middle school, have been testing how one-to-one texting can support students, teachers, and mentors to communicate rapidly about students’ personal needs. Our next step: to test how a group texting tool might support rapid communication among “teams” of students’ chosen supporters.

4. Parents and staff at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville kept emphasizing the need for schoolwide information efforts to unite their diverse, multilingual community. We worked on parent dialogue strategies (multilingual coffee hours, Reading Nights, and parent issue dialogues) and supported a parent to innovate an initial wiki for school reform notes. In 2010-11, we’ve focused on designing a Parent Connector Network, where bilingual parents use phones, Google forms, and a hotline to help get information to and input from immigrant and low-income families. After our local technologist prototyped the hotline, it has been further developed by friends at the Center for Civic Media at MIT. Next step: pilot the combination in 2011-12, and add PTA-run parent email/listserv training. See schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network.

5. We networked and brainstormed with city residents and other local researchers interested in citywide information-sharing, and some Somervillians began producing multilingual tools (public videos) enabling more youth/families to hear about community resources and events.

6. We’ve also supported people working on low-cost improvements to Somerville's computer infrastructure (refurbishing computers, teaching multi-age classes in a housing project) so that more people can access basic technology and gain basic technology skills to make such communications even possible.