Six projects

Six Projects: Summary

The OneVille Project divided up into six smaller projects exploring tools and strategies to help people communicate. Each has paired local researchers, youth, parents, educators, technologists, and community organizers:

Data dashboards

Eportfolios

Texting

Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

Citywide information sharing

Computer infrastructure

Click here to see mini descriptions of all projects, or click the sidebar to explore any single project.

Six Projects: Descriptions

Six diverse working groups of innovators of all ages have been testing and designing communication 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 plan for fall 2011 was to pilot the dashboards with the principal, teacher (who also was the dashboard views' co-designer), some of his parents, and an afterschool provider and consider how to develop the views to support users’ everyday discussions. Due to an undesired lag in final technological development, planned pilots of the “admin view” and “teacher view” were delayed, but code has been created that pulls data out of Somerville’s Student Information System for quick viewing and can be put to use in any such “dashboard” project.

2. Teachers and students at Somerville High School 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. In the eportfolio project, we all supported work SHS was already interested in doing -- transitioning paper portfolios to online portfolios that could show multiple viewers students' skills across the curriculum. SHS teachers and students took the lead, and eportfolio use is now expanding schoolwide. The [Somerville High School eportfolio website], designed by SHS teachers, continues to share great hints for teachers and students considering eportfolios.

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 and academic needs. In 2011-12, more students and teachers have been trying one-to-one texting and also testing 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 parents across 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 and 2011-12, parents focused on designing a Parent connector network, where bilingual parent "Connectors" use phones, a hotline, and in-person meetings to connect to their more recent immigrant parent peers, and to help communicate information to and input from immigrant and low-income families. The hotline was developed by friend Leo Burd at the Center for Civic Media at MIT.

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

6. We also supported a SHS grad working on low-cost improvements to Somerville's computer infrastructure (refurbishing computers, teaching multi-age classes in a housing project) so that more children and parents could access basic technology and gain basic technology skills to make such communications even possible. She did this in collaboration with Somerville's Haitian Coalition, in the Clarendon Hill housing development.

Our way of working

Our research questions

In various ways, we all touched upon these research questions in our six smaller projects.

To support young people, who needs to communicate which information to whom?

What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome?

Which communication channels and strategies, and which efforts to build relationships, might support particular necessary communications between these people?

When might basic tech help increase community cooperation in young people’s success, by supporting diverse students, teachers, parents, administrators, service providers, and other community members to share ideas, resources, and information and to build relationships? What are the limitations to technology use?

(You’ll see ¡Aha! written in red throughout this website. That means a moment when we figured out something of use about improving communications in education.)

Click here to learn more about other research supporting our work.

Our theory of action

We've been doing participatory design research, where people work together to improve something and document/analyze that work as they do it. Click here to learn more about the principles guiding this work.

Our model has become to work with diverse community members of all ages to

a) consider existing communication needs;

b) test existing free tech tools and low-cost communication strategies, to ensure they support necessary communications and collaboration in a diverse community;

c) consider which new tools and strategies need to be created, and build/test/develop them together so they seed in actual diverse schools;

d) share our efforts online, even if we're still learning -- so that others can learn from what we’ve done or teach us something new.

Some of us (Mica in particular) have come to call our work “improving the communication infrastructure of public education.” That's because we're seeing that if people embed low cost communication tools and strategies in their own schools and communities, with the goal of supporting the success of every student, they can make it normal for new kinds of partnership to happen.

Improving communication infrastructure means working to ensure that on a daily basis, the people who need to communicate information and ideas so they can collaborate in young people’s success can do it.

Our goal with this website

Finally, our goal with this website is to create and share documentation that

• helps educators, families, and young people to tackle similar issues where they live;
• helps researchers and the public to think differently about communications in diverse public school communities;
• helps connect us to others doing similar things.

Lots of documentation of innovation in education just tells you final accomplishments. In talking to people across the education field, we've heard a need for more descriptions of "how," even if part of the story is mistakes! So, we wanted to begin to share the following:

• our ¡Ahas! about our attempts to improve communication;
• our overall realizations and products;
• examples of "how to" do everything we tried, including technical documentation.

See Vision for OneVille documentation for more specifics.

Beyond the actual work done in Somerville, we hope that our deepest contribution with this website will be to get people thinking about:

• the tools and strategies needed to support the full range of necessary communications and partnership among members of a diverse educational community;
• how low cost/free tech, brought by youth, teachers, and families into the “core” of public schools, can help people communicate and collaborate in new ways to support young people;
• how people of all ages in a diverse community can work together to innovate all sorts of solutions for public education.

Click here to learn more about our next steps.