Oneville Wiki - User contributions [en]

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2011-11-06T17:14:00Z

209.6.84.160: /* The community’s need for the work */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, and Josh Wairi for the dashboard project, with dashboard development by local technologist Seth Woodworth.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project.

=The Details of the Work=
'''The expanded story behind our efforts, our communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and our turning points!

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project.

'''Starting off, and developing our goals:

As we began the OneVille Project back in summer 2009, we proposed to create a “dashboard” displaying basic data linking many youth- and child-related databases in the city. That was because many policymakers and researchers have a sense these days that the more data seen by more people, the better (see our [[Research Base]] page). But we quickly became unsure that “seeing everything” on young people was necessarily good – and especially, not clearly necessary at the level of the individual, family, teacher, and school administrator (does a teacher actually need to know a student’s police record in order to serve him better? Who exactly should see health data on children?). And anyway, the district was first interested in getting all of its own basic data viewable, quickly -- and that’s what we ended up working on in the end.

We also moved away from multi “sector”-database linking because SomerPromise, the Mayor's new site-based initiative to provide comprehensive youth services, was also interested in tackling the issue of linking databases across agencies, and we felt they were better positioned to pursue that goal even as we worked to lay groundwork for the effort by creating administrative and family-level views of school data alone. So, the goal became to create a simple data display that could help educators and families of youth in a single school see some basic data from district’s data warehousing software, Aspen X2, in a single view. This included creating a translated display easily understandable by an immigrant parent.

Throughout, we also became convinced that a dashboard shouldn’t just show data – it should help people communicate about it. Our rationale: Data displays in schools have traditionally been a) on paper and b) one-way. Think a report card or a quarterly report on one’s “scores”: schools or districts just “display” student scores to students and parents or show parents their child’s absences. Since OneVille’s goal is to support diverse partners in running communication about pursuing the success of young people, we 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.

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

In talking to families, teachers, and other service providers, we realized that just "getting data" on a student is never enough: people need to then converse (online, in person, or otherwise) about how the young person is doing and how they might be assisted. Just knowing how many days a child is absent is the first step, but then you need to have a conversation about why and what to do about it!

=='''The community’s need for the work==

Our work was shaped by a number of insights about necessary communications at the levels of student and family, teacher and classroom, school, and community.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Our dashboard sits “above” Aspen X2, the district’s current database, and displays its data in a more easily readable format for more people. Our dashboard is designed to be automatically updated: Each week, the district's chief of data can sends us updated data files, and when we receive them, they can be automatically uploaded into our dashboards.

The value of a dashboard on top of X2 became clear as parents, teachers, and afterschool providers all shared a range of concerns about the accessibility of the data as stored in X2:

[[Image:Aspen_X2_3.jpg|Aspen X2 screenshot]]

At the Healey School, older students and parents can log into X2, the student information system, to see updates on their grades, absences, etc. But many don't know that they do have passwords, and students told us they often forgot them. Any dashboard needs a password too, though, so it was really other issues that made a dashboard seem necessary: once some of these users would get to X2, they found the format of the data there hard to understand. In particular, information isn't translated for non-English speakers.

When a teacher logged into X2, for another example, it was hard to see any student’s growth over time (i.e., test score growth). As Josh pointed out, test scores are kept in pure chronological order and since students take many tests, it was hard for anyone looking at X2 to see growth on a single test from year to year. Further, the “fields,” or “boxes,” keeping data in X2 didn’t have calculations like test score growth: they just showed one score, then the next. Seth spent lots of time building “tubes” to make the dashboard automatically calculate this growth. Additionally, while the District's new report card importantly had sections for comments by teachers, those comments -- on particular skills listed on the report card -- only could be chosen from a drop-down list. Teachers could add longer summary comments on student progress only once per quarter, in the days when report cards “open” for updating and before they “close.” X2 also cuts off teacher comments at a certain length. So, the individual-level dashboard we designed has comment boxes next to each issue on the dashboard, for users to say whatever they want.

From an administrator’s perspective, it was hard to compare different aspects of student data simultaneously. For example, a request to the central office was required to link a table of attendance by student name with a table of MCAS score by student name. Principals also had to click through numerous choices within X2 before seeing any data at all. While queries to a busy central office could get a data report from staff, getting new data on demand -- during a staff meeting, for immediate discussion -- had not been feasible. 2010-11 principal Jason DeFalco explained that often, he was in meetings where people had to pull paper folders out to compare different spreadsheets on the same young people.

Finally, while some afterschool providers have direct access to X2, many don’t, meaning they had trouble knowing basic information like whether students who were coming to afterschool were going to school. For that reason, some important data fields were not kept in X2 at all yet, like the afterschool program in which children were enrolled or their attendance in that program. These providers typically kept their information in separate computer databases or on paper. Again and again, people voiced the need to see all the data in one place.

And perhaps most interesting, the existing X2 system was set up only to house student data -- not to help people talk about it. In talking about the individual-view dashboard prototype with parents, the major feature everyone emphasized was the ability to immediately comment ON data, rather than simply “look at it.”

Finally, our dashboard conversations with DeFalco and Vadhera showed us that all the data supporters needed to see did not come from the same place. Test score growth and years at Healey had to be calculated based on separate data in X2, and crucial data fields were not kept in X2 at all, like afterschool program. Incorporating data into our dashboards impressed upon us how much work, by many different people at the school, was necessary to track comprehensive data on any student.

We ultimately had to leave out some data we considered using because it was not yet kept in X2 (e.g., afterschool attendance, and specific in-school tutoring services students received). X2 is itself modifiable, so Somerville X2 users have at times considered whether they want to enter these additional fields into X2.

=='''Development Process==

From the very beginning, in the 2009-2010 school year, we collaborated with a range of Healey community members to design the dashboard’s user interface. As it turned out, Greg Nadeau, Somerville resident and Healey dad, had already made a color-coded Excel spreadsheet for the Healey Principal the year before we began work on the dashboard. It was an early Excel version of what we came to call the Admin View. Here’s the earliest version of our Admin View:

[[Image:Greg_nadeau_view.jpg]]

Before we made the dashboard version of this view “live” by connecting it to X2, the school’s main need at the time was entering updated data into the Excel spreadsheet -- by hand. We knew that we would eventually develop a dashboard to automatically transfer data from X2, but the school needed to integrate the data sets immediately. So Susan Klimczak, from the South End Technology Center at Tent City, who would later become the lead organizer for the eportfolio project, did some valiant handiwork, assisted by colleague Al Willis. They cleaned up the current year’s spreadsheet and added new data typically not kept in X2 that the principal also wanted to see, like afterschool enrollment. We also had some regular meetings via phone conference with Greg and the principal to consider the patterns the principal wanted to see and the new "fields" for data that the principal felt needed to be created permanently in the district student information system (e.g., attendance in the afterschool programs. Afterschool programs weren't keeping this data in Somerville's core data system, X2, and still don’t.)

'''Turning point: The Teacher View

Josh Wairi, a 5th grade teacher at the Healey, got interested in the dashboard design when we stopped by his classroom one day after school in the winter of 2011. Looking together at his computer and printouts, we realized he was already creating spreadsheets of student data from X2 by hand. He was interested in quickly displaying and sorting basic data, to supplement his face-to-face and phone conversations with students and parents. His work showed us the need for what would become the “Teacher View,” a version of the Administrator View in which all the students come from the same homeroom.

Between this stage and the final version of the admin and teacher views (below), Mica, Seth, and Jedd met with Principal DeFalco several times during the 2010-2011 year and new Principal Vadhera beginning during the summer of 2011 to figure out the highest priority data fields for the admin view and to brainstorm potential uses. Based on DeFalco’s feedback, and with Seth’s programming skill, we developed a dashboard to automatically transfer data from X2 to a user-friendly view. Seeing Greg’s initial prototype, above, sparked DeFalco to suggest additional data fields: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores (English language learner assessments), IEP status, and afterschool program name (in the end, we did not add program name to the dashboard, because it was never made a real field in X2.) From this feedback, we developed the view below (names are fictional to ensure anonymity):

[[Image:Schooldash.jpg]]

All data fields are visible on one screen – so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. With Vadhera, over the summer of 2011, we brainstormed additional uses for the admin staff, which are described below in the second-to-last ¡Ahas!, “Data really can launch a conversation.”

'''Turning Point: Making the report card online and interactive
Stories of parents and afterschool providers trying to communicate with teachers about students’ report cards prompted us to push forward on an “Individual View” that included the report card instead of just absences, grades, and test scores. Mica, Seth, Josh, and Jedd had many meetings in the spring of 2011 to brainstorm the design for this view, considering parent needs for accessibility and common communication challenges between teachers and parents. Josh was a critical resource on these issues.

We had also been inspired by the New Visions for New Schools project, which has had success with a view that gives parents and students a quick understanding of student performance on quantifiable measures. (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf) Compared with New Visions' view, we wanted to include the additional feature of allowing parents - and afterschool providers - to comment on any child's progress, send these comments to the teacher, and begin a conversation about how to support the student at home and in school. New Visions emphasizes a verbal agreement between family and teacher, called an “Improvement Plan,” so we created space on the dashboard page to write down this agreement. In our initial prototype, we did this by adding actual “Improvement Plan” text boxes in the right-hand side of the screen:

[[Image: New visions view.jpg]]

As we continued to develop the dashboard and add new types of basic data for viewing, we wanted to keep all the info on a single page for easy access, but new developments convinced us to spread the info out across several pages. At the time we were designing the “Individual View,” the District was ceasing to assign its elementary students numerical grades, or their equivalents on the typical A, B, C scale, and moving to a standards-based K-6 report card that asked teachers to grade students as proficient on a range of grade-level skills. So, we made Somerville's new K-6 report card (handed out on paper to families) online and color-coded. We also decided that we wanted the text boxes to prompt more of an ongoing conversation, rather than a formal quarterly agreement. So, we put these text boxes next to each chunk of data, with a prompt embedded in the “save comment” click button to encourage parents to write comments or questions. With the help of local technologist Evan Burchard, whom Seth recruited, we developed a revised version. The image below includes a sample tutor comment. That’s because in the months to come, we would realize that any approved viewer of the dashboard could comment:

[[Image:Individual view grades.jpg|grades]]

As we added the report card to the dashboard, we realized it was substantial enough that it needed its own page (above). In order to make the individual view as accessible as possible, even to families that are not used to looking at lots of quantitative data in one place, we spread the rest of the individual view’s information across several other pages, the names of which are visible as tabs at the top of each page. The individual view is now organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs allows the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile. We combined info about the student’s attendance and MCAS and MAP scores into the Individual View, which also includes the teacher’s quarterly summary comments from the report card:

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments]]

At this point, the Individual View offered many text box opportunities for parents and other service providers to enter comments. So, we created a “Comments” page, which captures all the comments entered for review before sending to the teacher. In thinking this through with Josh, we figured that the main (“homeroom”) teacher really had to be the “point person” for younger students in particular; so, all comments go to him/her as a starting point. On the dashboard’s final page, the parent or afterschool provider can also request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them:

[[Image: indivviewcommentsummary.jpg]]

Parents or other service providers can specify any new contact info and convenient meeting times. After receiving these comments, the homeroom teacher can forward any relevant parts to the appropriate subject area teachers via email. (Rather than have parents automatically “reply to all” on comments perhaps best designed for the homeroom teacher, Josh felt that homeroom teachers would like to take the lead in responding to and informing other involved teachers or service providers about families’ comments. Testing how these conversational dynamics actually go was to be an important piece of the pilot.)

As we’ve worked to import the district’s translations of the basic report card rubrics, we’ve considered encouraging immigrant parents to use Google Translate as a first step to translate teachers’ own comments and to write back to teachers about their reactions. In the future, we’d like to offer a translated version of the basic individual view in Spanish, Portuguese, perhaps Haitian Creole, and other major languages at the Healey School.

Overall, knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we’ve designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people use the tools will be up to them – but rather than have the tools just “display” data, we wanted the individual view, in particular, to also prompt and encourage communication about data.

==Feedback==

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

We’ve asked for feedback repeatedly on the dashboard views, showing it to administrators, families, and afterschool providers, including doing focused interviews with parents and students from Josh’s own class (parents participating in the pilot this year will continue to be co-designers). In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard could spark parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!" When asked whether the dashboard might feel like extra work, another parent articulated his/her vision of parent involvement: “Not extra – you have children, you spend time to communicate. The more time you spend, the better students do.” One English-speaking parent with three children at the school explained that the dashboard’s comment and scheduling features solved a long-standing problem for her: After being a Healey parent for 11 years, she had only ever had time to meet with each of her children’s core academic teachers during PTA nights, but never the specialty teachers, e.g., music, art, support room teachers. Our dashboard could enable and encourage parents like her to submit their questions, requests for meetings, and updated contact info to the student’s homeroom teacher, who could forward it to the specials teachers. Another parent was especially enthusiastic about online access: “I do everything on the computer now.” And another immigrant parent said he does “everything” on his smart phone!

'''¡Aha! Data really ''can ''launch a conversation.

In a recent meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the potential value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Online access to this data also could help close an even more basic communication gap, as Vadhera noted: “Even having this [individual view] up there [online] for parents to go back to,” could help when “the report card didn’t get in the backpack, or whatever.” She could see it being a powerful tool in conversations with parents who come in to see her, as there were often crossed wires about things as basic as students’ absences.

Purnima explained that on the admin view, she is interested in “anything that shows a gap.” Similarly, sorting attendance data by grade, for example, would save hours for staff who have typically printed the daily reports and then spent “a week” looking for patterns among the different pages.

In addition, she noted, students with IEPs and 504 plans sometimes need accommodations on the MCAS, and Purnima often spends “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers to ensure that everyone’s accommodation needs have been met. Our tool will allow her to sort by IEP and 504 status, so that all these students appear together, and, as she said, “so we don’t have moments when things fall through the cracks.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, discuss and design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. Such team conversations could involve the school’s “student support team,” a standing group of educators that Purnima described as “the central nervous system of the building,” including Purnima, the Vice Principal, Nurse, and Adjustment/Redirect Counselor. Josh explained that another advantage to the individual view is that in contrast to his whole-class spreadsheets, it could allow him to present a single student’s data in one of these team meetings without revealing all the other students’ grades unnecessarily (a breach of confidentiality). Finally, another relevant team that could use the dashboard to look at data together (even remotely) is made up of each student’s individualized group of supporters, e.g. their homeroom teacher, Special Ed or ELL specialists, and reading/math resource room staff. Josh expressed interest in piloting the dashboard this way.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

We planned to continue substantial parent outreach during the pilot phase to show parents how to use the dashboard. We would face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular – and our dashboard can be accessed through a smartphone), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language. The same work schedules that make parent-teacher meetings hard also make it hard for some parents to coordinate their schedules with the computer labs at local libraries or in the housing projects where some families live. (Also, to look at an online data display together, educators too need internet access -- not always easy if people meet in a room without a computer, wireless, or a laptop to plug into an ethernet cable.)

Several years from now, the proliferation of smartphones and iphones will likely shrink this challenge dramatically, making it easier than ever for partners to join the conversation about student data.

As of mid-October, 2011, the prototypes of the administrative and teacher views were complete pending new data from the District (which required building final "tubes" to the district's student information system), and the individual view was nearly complete. We hope that these dashboards will be useful enough, wherever they’re implemented, to help supporters ensure that students’ needs are met, spark collaboration among educators and families, and if useful, catch on. As Principal Vadhera explained about our planned incremental approach to implementation at the Healey School, “A lot of ideas start like THIS (gestures big with hands). And then they fail. This is a guinea pig, Josh could always share back, move forward in small increments. Teachers might just want to get on board with this!”

We planned to pilot our three “views” at the Healey in fall, 2011 and report out what we learned. However, the young local technologist who created these great products to community specifications went so slowly on our limited budget that our grant dried up and we weren’t able to pilot them. One classroom’s teacher, families, students, and supporting teachers were ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers, but the developer’s slowness and unreliability prompted a district administrator to pull the plug on the pilot – so the crack in the infrastructure remains.

The lesson here involves the timeline of software development, and the risks associated with community-based design research: The working relationship with the community partner (e.g., the school district) becomes asymmetrical when developing a software application from scratch - lots of work on the developer's end without immediate results for the community partner, leaving them with “cold feet” by the time the product is ready. We're optimistic that another community can pick up right where we left off, rather than starting from scratch like we did. The code for these dashboard products is now available online and free to the next developer. '''Our goal has always been to launch an open source dashboard design that could contribute not only in Somerville if it proved useful, but elsewhere through iterative development.

'''One piece of this project that has unflagging community support is our plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out in particular to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2011-11-06T17:08:41Z

209.6.84.160: /* The community’s need for the work */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, and Josh Wairi for the dashboard project, with dashboard development by local technologist Seth Woodworth.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project.

=The Details of the Work=
'''The expanded story behind our efforts, our communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and our turning points!

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project.

'''Starting off, and developing our goals:

As we began the OneVille Project back in summer 2009, we proposed to create a “dashboard” displaying basic data linking many youth- and child-related databases in the city. That was because many policymakers and researchers have a sense these days that the more data seen by more people, the better (see our [[Research Base]] page). But we quickly became unsure that “seeing everything” on young people was necessarily good – and especially, not clearly necessary at the level of the individual, family, teacher, and school administrator (does a teacher actually need to know a student’s police record in order to serve him better? Who exactly should see health data on children?). And anyway, the district was first interested in getting all of its own basic data viewable, quickly -- and that’s what we ended up working on in the end.

We also moved away from multi “sector”-database linking because SomerPromise, the Mayor's new site-based initiative to provide comprehensive youth services, was also interested in tackling the issue of linking databases across agencies, and we felt they were better positioned to pursue that goal even as we worked to lay groundwork for the effort by creating administrative and family-level views of school data alone. So, the goal became to create a simple data display that could help educators and families of youth in a single school see some basic data from district’s data warehousing software, Aspen X2, in a single view. This included creating a translated display easily understandable by an immigrant parent.

Throughout, we also became convinced that a dashboard shouldn’t just show data – it should help people communicate about it. Our rationale: Data displays in schools have traditionally been a) on paper and b) one-way. Think a report card or a quarterly report on one’s “scores”: schools or districts just “display” student scores to students and parents or show parents their child’s absences. Since OneVille’s goal is to support diverse partners in running communication about pursuing the success of young people, we 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.

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

In talking to families, teachers, and other service providers, we realized that just "getting data" on a student is never enough: people need to then converse (online, in person, or otherwise) about how the young person is doing and how they might be assisted. Just knowing how many days a child is absent is the first step, but then you need to have a conversation about why and what to do about it!

=='''The community’s need for the work==

Our work was shaped by a number of insights about necessary communications at the levels of student and family, teacher and classroom, school, and community.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Our dashboard sits “above” X2, the district’s current database, and displays its data in a more easily readable format for more people. Our dashboard is designed to be automatically updated: Each week, the district's chief of data can sends us updated data files, and when we receive them, they can be automatically uploaded into our dashboards.

Parents, teachers, and afterschool providers all had a range of concerns about the accessibility of the data as stored in the district’s current database, Aspen X2:

[[Image:Aspen_X2_3.jpg|Aspen X2 screenshot]]

At the Healey School, older students and parents can log into X2, the student information system, to see updates on their grades, absences, etc. But many don't know that they do have passwords, and students told us they often forgot them. Any dashboard needs a password too, though, so it was really other issues that made a dashboard seem necessary: once some of these users would get to X2, they found the format of the data there hard to understand. In particular, information isn't translated for non-English speakers.

When a teacher logged into X2, for another example, it was hard to see any student’s growth over time (i.e., test score growth). As Josh pointed out, test scores are kept in pure chronological order and since students take many tests, it was hard for anyone looking at X2 to see growth on a single test from year to year. Further, the “fields,” or “boxes,” keeping data in X2 didn’t have calculations like test score growth: they just showed one score, then the next. Seth spent lots of time building “tubes” to make the dashboard automatically calculate this growth. Additionally, while the District's new report card importantly had sections for comments by teachers, those comments -- on particular skills listed on the report card -- only could be chosen from a drop-down list. Teachers could add longer summary comments on student progress only once per quarter, in the days when report cards “open” for updating and before they “close.” X2 also cuts off teacher comments at a certain length. So, the individual-level dashboard we designed has comment boxes next to each issue on the dashboard, for users to say whatever they want.

From an administrator’s perspective, it was hard to compare different aspects of student data simultaneously. For example, a request to the central office was required to link a table of attendance by student name with a table of MCAS score by student name. Principals also had to click through numerous choices within X2 before seeing any data at all. While queries to a busy central office could get a data report from staff, getting new data on demand -- during a staff meeting, for immediate discussion -- had not been feasible. 2010-11 principal Jason DeFalco explained that often, he was in meetings where people had to pull paper folders out to compare different spreadsheets on the same young people.

Finally, while some afterschool providers have direct access to X2, many don’t, meaning they had trouble knowing basic information like whether students who were coming to afterschool were going to school. For that reason, some important data fields were not kept in X2 at all yet, like the afterschool program in which children were enrolled or their attendance in that program. These providers typically kept their information in separate computer databases or on paper. Again and again, people voiced the need to see all the data in one place.

And perhaps most interesting, the existing X2 system was set up only to house student data -- not to help people talk about it. In talking about the individual-view dashboard prototype with parents, the major feature everyone emphasized was the ability to immediately comment ON data, rather than simply “look at it.”

Finally, our dashboard conversations with DeFalco and Vadhera showed us that all the data supporters needed to see did not come from the same place. Test score growth and years at Healey had to be calculated based on separate data in X2, and crucial data fields were not kept in X2 at all, like afterschool program. Incorporating data into our dashboards impressed upon us how much work, by many different people at the school, was necessary to track comprehensive data on any student.

We ultimately had to leave out some data we considered using because it was not yet kept in X2 (e.g., afterschool attendance, and specific in-school tutoring services students received). X2 is itself modifiable, so Somerville X2 users have at times considered whether they want to enter these additional fields into X2.

=='''Development Process==

From the very beginning, in the 2009-2010 school year, we collaborated with a range of Healey community members to design the dashboard’s user interface. As it turned out, Greg Nadeau, Somerville resident and Healey dad, had already made a color-coded Excel spreadsheet for the Healey Principal the year before we began work on the dashboard. It was an early Excel version of what we came to call the Admin View. Here’s the earliest version of our Admin View:

[[Image:Greg_nadeau_view.jpg]]

Before we made the dashboard version of this view “live” by connecting it to X2, the school’s main need at the time was entering updated data into the Excel spreadsheet -- by hand. We knew that we would eventually develop a dashboard to automatically transfer data from X2, but the school needed to integrate the data sets immediately. So Susan Klimczak, from the South End Technology Center at Tent City, who would later become the lead organizer for the eportfolio project, did some valiant handiwork, assisted by colleague Al Willis. They cleaned up the current year’s spreadsheet and added new data typically not kept in X2 that the principal also wanted to see, like afterschool enrollment. We also had some regular meetings via phone conference with Greg and the principal to consider the patterns the principal wanted to see and the new "fields" for data that the principal felt needed to be created permanently in the district student information system (e.g., attendance in the afterschool programs. Afterschool programs weren't keeping this data in Somerville's core data system, X2, and still don’t.)

'''Turning point: The Teacher View

Josh Wairi, a 5th grade teacher at the Healey, got interested in the dashboard design when we stopped by his classroom one day after school in the winter of 2011. Looking together at his computer and printouts, we realized he was already creating spreadsheets of student data from X2 by hand. He was interested in quickly displaying and sorting basic data, to supplement his face-to-face and phone conversations with students and parents. His work showed us the need for what would become the “Teacher View,” a version of the Administrator View in which all the students come from the same homeroom.

Between this stage and the final version of the admin and teacher views (below), Mica, Seth, and Jedd met with Principal DeFalco several times during the 2010-2011 year and new Principal Vadhera beginning during the summer of 2011 to figure out the highest priority data fields for the admin view and to brainstorm potential uses. Based on DeFalco’s feedback, and with Seth’s programming skill, we developed a dashboard to automatically transfer data from X2 to a user-friendly view. Seeing Greg’s initial prototype, above, sparked DeFalco to suggest additional data fields: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores (English language learner assessments), IEP status, and afterschool program name (in the end, we did not add program name to the dashboard, because it was never made a real field in X2.) From this feedback, we developed the view below (names are fictional to ensure anonymity):

[[Image:Schooldash.jpg]]

All data fields are visible on one screen – so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. With Vadhera, over the summer of 2011, we brainstormed additional uses for the admin staff, which are described below in the second-to-last ¡Ahas!, “Data really can launch a conversation.”

'''Turning Point: Making the report card online and interactive
Stories of parents and afterschool providers trying to communicate with teachers about students’ report cards prompted us to push forward on an “Individual View” that included the report card instead of just absences, grades, and test scores. Mica, Seth, Josh, and Jedd had many meetings in the spring of 2011 to brainstorm the design for this view, considering parent needs for accessibility and common communication challenges between teachers and parents. Josh was a critical resource on these issues.

We had also been inspired by the New Visions for New Schools project, which has had success with a view that gives parents and students a quick understanding of student performance on quantifiable measures. (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf) Compared with New Visions' view, we wanted to include the additional feature of allowing parents - and afterschool providers - to comment on any child's progress, send these comments to the teacher, and begin a conversation about how to support the student at home and in school. New Visions emphasizes a verbal agreement between family and teacher, called an “Improvement Plan,” so we created space on the dashboard page to write down this agreement. In our initial prototype, we did this by adding actual “Improvement Plan” text boxes in the right-hand side of the screen:

[[Image: New visions view.jpg]]

As we continued to develop the dashboard and add new types of basic data for viewing, we wanted to keep all the info on a single page for easy access, but new developments convinced us to spread the info out across several pages. At the time we were designing the “Individual View,” the District was ceasing to assign its elementary students numerical grades, or their equivalents on the typical A, B, C scale, and moving to a standards-based K-6 report card that asked teachers to grade students as proficient on a range of grade-level skills. So, we made Somerville's new K-6 report card (handed out on paper to families) online and color-coded. We also decided that we wanted the text boxes to prompt more of an ongoing conversation, rather than a formal quarterly agreement. So, we put these text boxes next to each chunk of data, with a prompt embedded in the “save comment” click button to encourage parents to write comments or questions. With the help of local technologist Evan Burchard, whom Seth recruited, we developed a revised version. The image below includes a sample tutor comment. That’s because in the months to come, we would realize that any approved viewer of the dashboard could comment:

[[Image:Individual view grades.jpg|grades]]

As we added the report card to the dashboard, we realized it was substantial enough that it needed its own page (above). In order to make the individual view as accessible as possible, even to families that are not used to looking at lots of quantitative data in one place, we spread the rest of the individual view’s information across several other pages, the names of which are visible as tabs at the top of each page. The individual view is now organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs allows the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile. We combined info about the student’s attendance and MCAS and MAP scores into the Individual View, which also includes the teacher’s quarterly summary comments from the report card:

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments]]

At this point, the Individual View offered many text box opportunities for parents and other service providers to enter comments. So, we created a “Comments” page, which captures all the comments entered for review before sending to the teacher. In thinking this through with Josh, we figured that the main (“homeroom”) teacher really had to be the “point person” for younger students in particular; so, all comments go to him/her as a starting point. On the dashboard’s final page, the parent or afterschool provider can also request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them:

[[Image: indivviewcommentsummary.jpg]]

Parents or other service providers can specify any new contact info and convenient meeting times. After receiving these comments, the homeroom teacher can forward any relevant parts to the appropriate subject area teachers via email. (Rather than have parents automatically “reply to all” on comments perhaps best designed for the homeroom teacher, Josh felt that homeroom teachers would like to take the lead in responding to and informing other involved teachers or service providers about families’ comments. Testing how these conversational dynamics actually go was to be an important piece of the pilot.)

As we’ve worked to import the district’s translations of the basic report card rubrics, we’ve considered encouraging immigrant parents to use Google Translate as a first step to translate teachers’ own comments and to write back to teachers about their reactions. In the future, we’d like to offer a translated version of the basic individual view in Spanish, Portuguese, perhaps Haitian Creole, and other major languages at the Healey School.

Overall, knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we’ve designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people use the tools will be up to them – but rather than have the tools just “display” data, we wanted the individual view, in particular, to also prompt and encourage communication about data.

==Feedback==

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

We’ve asked for feedback repeatedly on the dashboard views, showing it to administrators, families, and afterschool providers, including doing focused interviews with parents and students from Josh’s own class (parents participating in the pilot this year will continue to be co-designers). In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard could spark parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!" When asked whether the dashboard might feel like extra work, another parent articulated his/her vision of parent involvement: “Not extra – you have children, you spend time to communicate. The more time you spend, the better students do.” One English-speaking parent with three children at the school explained that the dashboard’s comment and scheduling features solved a long-standing problem for her: After being a Healey parent for 11 years, she had only ever had time to meet with each of her children’s core academic teachers during PTA nights, but never the specialty teachers, e.g., music, art, support room teachers. Our dashboard could enable and encourage parents like her to submit their questions, requests for meetings, and updated contact info to the student’s homeroom teacher, who could forward it to the specials teachers. Another parent was especially enthusiastic about online access: “I do everything on the computer now.” And another immigrant parent said he does “everything” on his smart phone!

'''¡Aha! Data really ''can ''launch a conversation.

In a recent meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the potential value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Online access to this data also could help close an even more basic communication gap, as Vadhera noted: “Even having this [individual view] up there [online] for parents to go back to,” could help when “the report card didn’t get in the backpack, or whatever.” She could see it being a powerful tool in conversations with parents who come in to see her, as there were often crossed wires about things as basic as students’ absences.

Purnima explained that on the admin view, she is interested in “anything that shows a gap.” Similarly, sorting attendance data by grade, for example, would save hours for staff who have typically printed the daily reports and then spent “a week” looking for patterns among the different pages.

In addition, she noted, students with IEPs and 504 plans sometimes need accommodations on the MCAS, and Purnima often spends “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers to ensure that everyone’s accommodation needs have been met. Our tool will allow her to sort by IEP and 504 status, so that all these students appear together, and, as she said, “so we don’t have moments when things fall through the cracks.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, discuss and design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. Such team conversations could involve the school’s “student support team,” a standing group of educators that Purnima described as “the central nervous system of the building,” including Purnima, the Vice Principal, Nurse, and Adjustment/Redirect Counselor. Josh explained that another advantage to the individual view is that in contrast to his whole-class spreadsheets, it could allow him to present a single student’s data in one of these team meetings without revealing all the other students’ grades unnecessarily (a breach of confidentiality). Finally, another relevant team that could use the dashboard to look at data together (even remotely) is made up of each student’s individualized group of supporters, e.g. their homeroom teacher, Special Ed or ELL specialists, and reading/math resource room staff. Josh expressed interest in piloting the dashboard this way.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

We planned to continue substantial parent outreach during the pilot phase to show parents how to use the dashboard. We would face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular – and our dashboard can be accessed through a smartphone), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language. The same work schedules that make parent-teacher meetings hard also make it hard for some parents to coordinate their schedules with the computer labs at local libraries or in the housing projects where some families live. (Also, to look at an online data display together, educators too need internet access -- not always easy if people meet in a room without a computer, wireless, or a laptop to plug into an ethernet cable.)

Several years from now, the proliferation of smartphones and iphones will likely shrink this challenge dramatically, making it easier than ever for partners to join the conversation about student data.

As of mid-October, 2011, the prototypes of the administrative and teacher views were complete pending new data from the District (which required building final "tubes" to the district's student information system), and the individual view was nearly complete. We hope that these dashboards will be useful enough, wherever they’re implemented, to help supporters ensure that students’ needs are met, spark collaboration among educators and families, and if useful, catch on. As Principal Vadhera explained about our planned incremental approach to implementation at the Healey School, “A lot of ideas start like THIS (gestures big with hands). And then they fail. This is a guinea pig, Josh could always share back, move forward in small increments. Teachers might just want to get on board with this!”

We planned to pilot our three “views” at the Healey in fall, 2011 and report out what we learned. However, the young local technologist who created these great products to community specifications went so slowly on our limited budget that our grant dried up and we weren’t able to pilot them. One classroom’s teacher, families, students, and supporting teachers were ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers, but the developer’s slowness and unreliability prompted a district administrator to pull the plug on the pilot – so the crack in the infrastructure remains.

The lesson here involves the timeline of software development, and the risks associated with community-based design research: The working relationship with the community partner (e.g., the school district) becomes asymmetrical when developing a software application from scratch - lots of work on the developer's end without immediate results for the community partner, leaving them with “cold feet” by the time the product is ready. We're optimistic that another community can pick up right where we left off, rather than starting from scratch like we did. The code for these dashboard products is now available online and free to the next developer. '''Our goal has always been to launch an open source dashboard design that could contribute not only in Somerville if it proved useful, but elsewhere through iterative development.

'''One piece of this project that has unflagging community support is our plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out in particular to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-11-06T16:52:43Z

209.6.84.160: /* Communication we hoped to improve */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, and Josh Wairi for the dashboard project, with dashboard development by local technologist Seth Woodworth

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there shouldn't be a reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately. Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success. We got to the brink of piloting these tools in our first phase of work. The code for them, available to anyone, is at the end of this page.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project so far. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created the core of three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. Our plan has been to pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his parents have wanted to pilot the individual and teacher views, and Principal Purnima Vadhera has wanted to pilot the admin view. Technological development went slower than we hoped -- always an issue in making tools from scratch, especially on a budget -- and so we ended our Phase 1 at the brink of piloting.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It seems crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

To clarify: Somerville, like a typical district, already has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. The issue is that such data have been hard for people to view quickly all in one place. Many schools, and also, afterschool programs, do not have easy tools for quickly displaying basic information to multiple partners at once, for putting that data all in one place for viewing, or letting them sort the data for patterns. Our "dashboards" have been designed to sit on top of the student information system for easy viewing OF data. In Somerville, while the data on these "dashboards" all exist in Somerville's student info system, lots of people still talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators.

The dashboards are designed to be automatically updated: Each week, the district's chief of data can sends us updated data files, and when we receive them, they can be automatically uploaded into our dashboards.

In Somerville, administrators have had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: when they could access the student information system with a password, many parents and some teachers had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, and the data is only in English. And finally, the data display couldn't easily launch a conversation between the people in a student's life: many viewers (e.g, parents) cannot comment ON the data in the student information system, but can only view it.

Finally, even in districts that have created expensive data display systems, often the problem is getting actual use. So, we wanted to try to design tools to community specifications.

Here was another key piece of our logic in designing dashboards for Somerville from scratch: Rather than suggesting that Somerville buy a tool "off the shelf," we decided to develop an open source data viewing tool because we figured an open source tool (made with "free to modify" software modifiable by any skilled programmer anywhere) could save Somerville and other districts lots of money.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, IF design goes fast enough, IF community users are ready to use the tools, and IF tech support for open source tools remains available locally.

Others had offered to make Somerville data-viewing tools for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then require tens of thousands of dollars for annual upkeep. We figured that with our grant, we could work with a local technologist to develop an open source tool to educators' and parents' specifications; any next district or developer could then have the software for their own use.

Our logic: If open source development produces a free tool, districts don't have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use it. Those using free tools only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our local technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Districts also pay lots of money for store-bought, "off the shelf" dashboard tools and then find them unused by the community. We wanted to try to build something to community specifications instead.

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey dad Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin and teacher view dashboards we made are designed to provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data (as users do to see data in the district's student information system). Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) is designed to be used by educators, parents, and afterschool providers; it complements the "admin" and "teacher views" with additional student data that was identified by Healey parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other.

Importantly to the OneVille Project, this "individual view" also is designed to give parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment ON the data and send these comments to the teacher's email inbox, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs, covering grades, test scores, attendance, and teacher summary comments.

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

Our goal in fall 2011-12 has been to pilot and tweak these three tools with a group of interested educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We have all wanted to now explore the ways these tools actually can support information-sharing and conversation among all these people, in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

In all this, we've encountered the core problem with designing and creating tools from scratch, to community specifications and on a budget: relying on individual technologists rather than large companies. While our local technologist worked to produce tools to community specifications, he went too slowly, and when we wanted to start the pilot as our grant ended Sept 1, the views weren't ready.

Our entire Ford grant would have been eaten up in buying Somerville a tool off the shelf; but in designing locally, to community specifications, for small amounts of money, local technologists created the core of the tools but ran out of time and money to do more than a very small pilot.

Even if the tools don't seed in Somerville in the end, the open source code can support next efforts at free educational data displays for districts or programs too often spending fortunes on storebought tools. We have added a tool to the “kit” by producing an open source dashboard and code next developers can modify. Still, we note that the OneVille projects in which we used preexisting tools – Google sites or wikispaces for eportfolio software, and texting software like Google Voice – seeded the most longstanding local change most quickly and actually got people communicating.

We note that professional (more expensive) open source developers able to produce tools more quickly, or local technologists on larger budgets, might provide more immediately ready open source infrastructure for schools and districts. For example, after the same local young technologist struggled to complete our Parent Connector Network hotline, the hotline was finally made by Leo Burd, a new colleague at MIT's Center for Civic Media who specialized in such open source tools and was inspired enough by the Parent Connector project that he did it for free.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas! and turning points did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: People say it's crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, IF design goes fast enough, IF community users are ready to use the tools, and IF tech support for open source tools remains available locally.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. Rather than say parents "won't use" technology, how about training?

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

In addition to our '''Main ¡Ahas! about data dashboards, we had other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

Throughout the design process, we’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, for example, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard could spark parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email.

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. Rather than say parents "won't use" technology, how about training?''' We’d need to continue training outreach on the dashboards during a pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language. These communication barriers block parents from understanding data even if it is on paper or shared verbally; technology training at least offers parents skills for checking data on demand.

'''While some at the Healey are disappointed not to try the dashboard in a broad way this fall, one piece of this project that has unflagging community support is our plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. Our goal was to link this training to the dashboard training for parents; instead our hook will be the school's newly schoolwide listserv. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out in particular to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

The ultimate lesson here involves the timeline of software development, and the risks associated with community-based design research if one is literally designing a new technological tool from scratch. Developing a software application from scratch means lots of work on the developer's end without immediate use by the community partner, unless major funding remains to keep modifying the product over time. The reality is that the young local technologist who created these products to community specifications went so slowly on our limited budget that we weren’t able to pilot them. We might lose confidence in local open source development, but the reality is that a tool for easily seeing data "all in one place" otherwise will not exist in Somerville due to the expense of "off the shelf" tools. We're optimistic that if not in Somerville, another community and next developer can pick up right where we left off, rather than starting from scratch like we did. That's how open source development works, in fact. The code for these dashboard products is now available online and free to the next developer (see below, Technological How-Tos).

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment to test which works for what?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how might low cost tech development or, professional development on the tools you already have, support such information-sharing?
:➢ ***How can you ensure resources for ongoing tech modifications and tech support after you have developed your initial tool?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

[https://github.com/sethwoodworth/SchoolDash Admin/Teacher View Source Code]
(written in the Django framework)

[https://github.com/sethwoodworth/OnevilleReportCard/ Individual View Source Code]
(written in the Ruby on Rails framework)

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Summary: Data dashboards

2011-11-03T06:49:20Z

209.6.84.160:

Click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

===What communication challenges did this project address?===

In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to quickly show parents or teachers basic patterns affecting students – like their absences, test scores, grades, and credits, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, how to read data once they are given it (e.g., a report card), and how to communicate with schools about it. (see http://www.nationalpirc.org/engagement_webinars/webinar-student-data.html)

Gaps in available basic data also can create gaps in student service, because people in charge of supporting a young person remain unaware about some key aspects of their situation (was Jose absent five days last month, or not?)

Over the past two years, local technologists, teachers, and researchers have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help create tools enabling key people to go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) on each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.

The first dashboard below shows data on a school or classroom of students. The dashboard beneath it shows additional data on an individual student to teachers, parents, and approved afterschool providers, and allows them to communicate with each other through the “comment boxes.” (Names are fictional to preserve anonymity.)

[[Image:NewAdminDash*.jpg|NewAdminDash*.jpg]]

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

===Why is it important to improve communications?===
What we found:

:*'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

:*'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: People say it's crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

:*'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, IF design goes fast enough, IF community users are ready to use the tools, and IF tech support for open source tools remains available locally.

:*'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

===How do the dashboards work? How would they be implemented?===

:*You can see how we designed our dashboards in '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''and '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]]'''.

===How do you know if your school could improve communication?===
'''Questions to ask about the current system in your school:

:➢ To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢ How does your school make data on student learning visible to school administrators, classroom teachers, and afterschool providers? And how about parents?
:➢ What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people?
:➢ Which conversations about data should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?
:➢ What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢ Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech development support such information-sharing, and design something local people would actually use?
:➢ ***How can you ensure resources for ongoing tech modifications and tech support after you have developed your initial tool?

Click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Summary: Data dashboards

2011-11-03T06:49:11Z

209.6.84.160:

hClick here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

===What communication challenges did this project address?===

In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to quickly show parents or teachers basic patterns affecting students – like their absences, test scores, grades, and credits, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, how to read data once they are given it (e.g., a report card), and how to communicate with schools about it. (see http://www.nationalpirc.org/engagement_webinars/webinar-student-data.html)

Gaps in available basic data also can create gaps in student service, because people in charge of supporting a young person remain unaware about some key aspects of their situation (was Jose absent five days last month, or not?)

Over the past two years, local technologists, teachers, and researchers have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help create tools enabling key people to go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) on each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.

The first dashboard below shows data on a school or classroom of students. The dashboard beneath it shows additional data on an individual student to teachers, parents, and approved afterschool providers, and allows them to communicate with each other through the “comment boxes.” (Names are fictional to preserve anonymity.)

[[Image:NewAdminDash*.jpg|NewAdminDash*.jpg]]

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

===Why is it important to improve communications?===
What we found:

:*'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

:*'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: People say it's crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

:*'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, IF design goes fast enough, IF community users are ready to use the tools, and IF tech support for open source tools remains available locally.

:*'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

===How do the dashboards work? How would they be implemented?===

:*You can see how we designed our dashboards in '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''and '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]]'''.

===How do you know if your school could improve communication?===
'''Questions to ask about the current system in your school:

:➢ To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢ How does your school make data on student learning visible to school administrators, classroom teachers, and afterschool providers? And how about parents?
:➢ What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people?
:➢ Which conversations about data should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?
:➢ What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢ Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech development support such information-sharing, and design something local people would actually use?
:➢ ***How can you ensure resources for ongoing tech modifications and tech support after you have developed your initial tool?

Click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2011-10-31T03:04:42Z

209.6.84.160: /* Development Process */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project.

=The Details of the Work=
'''The expanded story behind our efforts, our communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and our turning points!

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project.

'''Starting off, and developing our goals:

As we began the OneVille Project back in summer 2009, we proposed to create a “dashboard” displaying basic data linking many youth- and child-related databases in the city. That was because many policymakers and researchers have a sense these days that the more data seen by more people, the better (see our [[Research Base]] page). But we quickly became unsure that “seeing everything” on young people was necessarily good – and especially, not clearly necessary at the level of the individual, family, teacher, and school administrator (does a teacher actually need to know a student’s police record in order to serve him better? Who exactly should see health data on children?). And anyway, the district was first interested in getting all of its own basic data viewable, quickly -- and that’s what we ended up working on in the end.

We also moved away from multi “sector”-database linking because SomerPromise, the Mayor's new site-based initiative to provide comprehensive youth services, was also interested in tackling the issue of linking databases across agencies, and we felt they were better positioned to pursue that goal even as we worked to lay groundwork for the effort by creating administrative and family-level views of school data alone. So, the goal became to create a simple data display that could help educators and families of youth in a single school see some basic data from district’s data warehousing software, Aspen X2, in a single view. This included creating a translated display easily understandable by an immigrant parent.

Throughout, we also became convinced that a dashboard shouldn’t just show data – it should help people communicate about it. Our rationale: Data displays in schools have traditionally been a) on paper and b) one-way. Think a report card or a quarterly report on one’s “scores”: schools or districts just “display” student scores to students and parents or show parents their child’s absences. Since OneVille’s goal is to support diverse partners in running communication about pursuing the success of young people, we 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.

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

In talking to families, teachers, and other service providers, we realized that just "getting data" on a student is never enough: people need to then converse (online, in person, or otherwise) about how the young person is doing and how they might be assisted. Just knowing how many days a child is absent is the first step, but then you need to have a conversation about why and what to do about it!

=='''The community’s need for the work==

Our work was shaped by a number of insights about necessary communications at the levels of student and family, teacher and classroom, school, and community.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Our dashboard sits “above” X2, the district’s current database, and displays its data in a more easily readable format for more people.

Parents, teachers, and afterschool providers all had a range of concerns about the accessibility of the data as stored in the district’s current database, Aspen X2:

[[Image:Aspen_X2_3.jpg|Aspen X2 screenshot]]

At the Healey School, older students and parents can log into X2, the student information system, to see updates on their grades, absences, etc. But many don't know that they do have passwords, and students told us they often forgot them. Any dashboard needs a password too, though, so it was really other issues that made a dashboard seem necessary: more importantly, once some of these users would get to X2, they found the format of the data there hard to understand. In particular, information isn't translated for non-English speakers.

When a teacher logged into X2, for another example, it was hard to see any student’s growth over time (i.e., test score growth) As Josh pointed out, test scores are kept in pure chronological order and since students take many tests, it was hard for anyone looking at X2 to see growth on a single test from year to year. Further, the “fields,” or “boxes,” keeping data in X2 didn’t have calculations like test score growth (they just showed one score, then the next). (Our technologist, Seth Woodworth, spent lots of time building “tubes” to make the dashboard automatically calculate this growth.) While the new report card importantly had sections for comments by teachers, those comments -- on particular skills listed on the report card -- only could be chosen from a drop-down list. Teachers could add longer summary comments on student progress only once per quarter, in the days when report cards “open” for updating and before they “close.” X2 also cuts off teacher comments at a certain length.

From an administrator’s perspective, different data sets were not automatically linked. For example, a request to the central office was required to link a table of attendance by student name with a table of MCAS score by student name. Principals also had to click through numerous choices within X2 before seeing any data at all. While queries to a busy central office could get a data report from staff, getting new data on demand -- during a staff meeting, for immediate discussion -- had not been feasible. 2010-11 principal Jason DeFalco explained that often, he was in meetings where people had to pull folders out to compare different spreadsheets on the same young people.

Finally, while some afterschool providers have direct access to X2, many don’t, meaning they had trouble knowing basic information like whether students who were coming to afterschool were going to school. For that reason, some important data fields were not kept in X2 at all yet, like the afterschool program in which children were enrolled or their attendance in that program. These providers typically kept their information in separate computer databases or even on paper. Again and again, people voiced the need to see all the data in one place.

And perhaps most interesting, the existing X2 system was set up only to house student data -- not to help people talk about it. In talking about our dashboard prototypes with parents, the major feature everyone emphasized was the ability to immediately comment ON data, rather than simply “look at it.”

Our dashboard conversations with DeFalco and Vadhera showed us that all our data did not come from the same place. Test score growth and years at Healey had to be calculated based on other data in X2, and crucial data fields were not kept in X2 at all, i.e., MEPA scores, ELL and IEP status, home language, and afterschool program. Because data in X2 was also not “linked,” or organized in the same way we wanted for our dashboard, our technologist, Seth Woodworth, spend lots of time building “tubes” from the different parts of the district’s X2 database to our dashboards. Incorporating this data into our dashboards impressed upon us how much work, by many different people at the school, was necessary to track comprehensive data on any student.

We ultimately had to leave out some data we considered using because it was not yet kept in X2 (e.g., afterschool attendance, and specific in-school tutoring services students received). If our dashboards prove useful and become adopted by the school, staff can reconsider whether they want to enter additional fields into X2.

=='''Development Process==

From the very beginning, in the 2009-2010 school year, we collaborated with a range of Healey community members to design the dashboard’s user interface. As it turned out, Greg Nadeau, Somerville resident and Healey dad, had already made a color-coded Excel spreadsheet for the Healey Principal the year before we began work on the dashboard. It was an early Excel version of what later became our Administrator Dashboard View (what we came to call the Admin View). Here’s the earliest version of our Admin View:

[[Image:Greg_nadeau_view.jpg]]

Before we made the dashboard version of this view “live” by connecting it to X2, the school’s main need at the time was entering updated data into the Excel spreadsheet -- by hand. We knew that we would eventually develop a dashboard to automatically transfer data from X2, but the school needed to integrate the data sets immediately. So Susan Klimczak, from the South End Technology Center at Tent City, who would later become the lead organizer for the eportfolio project, did some valiant handiwork, assisted by colleague Al Willis. They cleaned up the current year’s spreadsheet and added new data typically not kept in X2 that the principal also wanted to see, like afterschool enrollment. We also had some regular meetings via phone conference with Greg and the principal to consider the patterns the principal wanted to see and the new "fields" for data that the principal felt needed to be created permanently in the district student information system (e.g., attendance in the afterschool programs. Afterschool programs weren't keeping this data in Somerville's core data system, X2, and still don’t.)

'''Turning point: The Teacher View

Josh Wairi, a 5th grade teacher at the Healey, got interested in the dashboard design when we stopped by his classroom one day after school in the winter of 2011. Looking together at his computer and printouts, we realized he was already creating spreadsheets of student data from X2 by hand. He was interested in quickly displaying and sorting basic data, to supplement his face-to-face and phone conversations with students and parents. His work showed us the need for what would become the “Teacher View,” a version of the Administrator View in which all the students come from the same homeroom.

Between this stage and the final version of the admin and teacher views (below), Mica, Seth, and Jedd met with Principal DeFalco several times during the 2010-2011 year and new Principal Vadhera beginning during the summer of 2011 to figure out the highest priority data fields for the admin view and to brainstorm potential uses. Based on DeFalco’s feedback, and with Seth’s programming skill, we developed a dashboard to automatically transfer data from X2 to a user-friendly view. Seeing Greg’s initial prototype, above, sparked DeFalco to suggest additional data fields: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores (English language learner assessments), IEP status, and afterschool program name (in the end, we did not add program name to the dashboard, because it was never made a real field in X2.) From this feedback, we developed the view below (names are fictional to ensure anonymity):

[[Image:Schooldash.jpg]]

All data fields are visible on one screen – so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. With Vadhera, over the summer of 2011, we brainstormed additional uses for the admin staff, which are described below in the second-to-last ¡Ahas!, “Data really can launch a conversation.”

'''Turning Point: Making the report card online and interactive
Stories of parents and afterschool providers trying to communicate with teachers about students’ report cards prompted us to push forward on an “Individual View” that included the report card instead of just absences, grades, and test scores. Mica, Seth, Josh, and Jedd had many meetings in the spring of 2011 to brainstorm the design for this view, considering parent needs for accessibility and common communication challenges between teachers and parents. Josh was a critical resource on these issues.

We had also been inspired by the New Visions for New Schools project, which has had success with a view that gives parents and students a quick understanding of student performance on quantifiable measures. (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf) Compared with New Visions' view, we wanted to include the additional feature of allowing parents - and afterschool providers - to comment on any child's progress, send these comments to the teacher, and begin a conversation about how to support the student at home and in school. New Visions emphasizes a verbal agreement between family and teacher, called an “Improvement Plan,” so we created space on the dashboard page to write down this agreement. In our initial prototype, we did this by adding actual “Improvement Plan” text boxes in the right-hand side of the screen:

[[Image: New visions view.jpg]]

As we continued to develop the dashboard and add new types of basic data for viewing, we wanted to keep all the info on a single page for easy access, but new developments convinced us to spread the info out across several pages. At the time we were designing the “Individual View,” the District was ceasing to assign its elementary students numerical grades, or their equivalents on the typical A, B, C scale, and moving to a standards-based K-6 report card that asked teachers to grade students as proficient on a range of grade-level skills. So, we made Somerville's new K-6 report card (handed out on paper to families) online and color-coded. We also decided that we wanted the text boxes to prompt more of an ongoing conversation, rather than a formal quarterly agreement. So, we put these text boxes next to each chunk of data, with a prompt embedded in the “save comment” click button to encourage parents to write comments or questions. With the help of local technologist Evan Burchard, whom Seth recruited, we developed a revised version. The image below includes a sample tutor comment. That’s because in the months to come, we would realize that any approved viewer of the dashboard could comment:

[[Image:Individual view grades.jpg|grades]]

As we added the report card to the dashboard, we realized it was substantial enough that it needed its own page (above). In order to make the individual view as accessible as possible, even to families that are not used to looking at lots of quantitative data in one place, we spread the rest of the individual view’s information across several other pages, the names of which are visible as tabs at the top of each page. The individual view is now organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs allows the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile. We combined info about the student’s attendance and MCAS and MAP scores into the Individual View, which also includes the teacher’s quarterly summary comments from the report card:

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments]]

At this point, the Individual View offered many text box opportunities for parents and other service providers to enter comments. So, we created a “Comments” page, which captures all the comments entered for review before sending to the teacher. In thinking this through with Josh, we figured that the main (“homeroom”) teacher really had to be the “point person” for younger students in particular; so, all comments go to him/her as a starting point. On the dashboard’s final page, the parent or afterschool provider can also request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them:

[[Image: indiv view comments]]

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2011-10-31T02:51:52Z

209.6.84.160: /* Development Process */

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2011-10-31T01:39:19Z

209.6.84.160: /* Development Process */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project.

=The Details of the Work=
'''The expanded story behind our efforts, our communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and our turning points!

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project.

'''Starting off, and developing our goals:

As we began the OneVille Project back in summer 2009, we proposed to create a “dashboard” displaying basic data linking many youth- and child-related databases in the city. That was because many policymakers and researchers have a sense these days that the more data seen by more people, the better (see our [[Research Base]] page). But we quickly became unsure that “seeing everything” on young people was necessarily good – and especially, not clearly necessary at the level of the individual, family, teacher, and school administrator (does a teacher actually need to know a student’s police record in order to serve him better? Who exactly should see health data on children?). And anyway, the district was first interested in getting all of its own basic data viewable, quickly -- and that’s what we ended up working on in the end.

We also moved away from multi “sector”-database linking because SomerPromise, the Mayor's new site-based initiative to provide comprehensive youth services, was also interested in tackling the issue of linking databases across agencies, and we felt they were better positioned to pursue that goal even as we worked to lay groundwork for the effort by creating administrative and family-level views of school data alone. So, the goal became to create a simple data display that could help educators and families of youth in a single school see some basic data from district’s data warehousing software, Aspen X2, in a single view. This included creating a translated display easily understandable by an immigrant parent.

Throughout, we also became convinced that a dashboard shouldn’t just show data – it should help people communicate about it. Our rationale: Data displays in schools have traditionally been a) on paper and b) one-way. Think a report card or a quarterly report on one’s “scores”: schools or districts just “display” student scores to students and parents or show parents their child’s absences. Since OneVille’s goal is to support diverse partners in running communication about pursuing the success of young people, we 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.

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

In talking to families, teachers, and other service providers, we realized that just "getting data" on a student is never enough: people need to then converse (online, in person, or otherwise) about how the young person is doing and how they might be assisted. Just knowing how many days a child is absent is the first step, but then you need to have a conversation about why and what to do about it!

=='''The community’s need for the work==

Our work was shaped by a number of insights about necessary communications at the levels of student and family, teacher and classroom, school, and community.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Our dashboard sits “above” X2, the district’s current database, and displays its data in a more easily readable format for more people.

Parents, teachers, and afterschool providers all had a range of concerns about the accessibility of the data as stored in the district’s current database, Aspen X2:

[[Image:Aspen_X2_3.jpg|Aspen X2 screenshot]]

At the Healey School, older students and parents can log into X2, the student information system, to see updates on their grades, absences, etc. But many don't know that they do have passwords, and students told us they often forgot them. Any dashboard needs a password too, though, so it was really other issues that made a dashboard seem necessary: more importantly, once some of these users would get to X2, they found the format of the data there hard to understand. In particular, information isn't translated for non-English speakers.

When a teacher logged into X2, for another example, it was hard to see any student’s growth over time (i.e., test score growth) As Josh pointed out, test scores are kept in pure chronological order and since students take many tests, it was hard for anyone looking at X2 to see growth on a single test from year to year. Further, the “fields,” or “boxes,” keeping data in X2 didn’t have calculations like test score growth (they just showed one score, then the next). (Our technologist, Seth Woodworth, spent lots of time building “tubes” to make the dashboard automatically calculate this growth.) While the new report card importantly had sections for comments by teachers, those comments -- on particular skills listed on the report card -- only could be chosen from a drop-down list. Teachers could add longer summary comments on student progress only once per quarter, in the days when report cards “open” for updating and before they “close.” X2 also cuts off teacher comments at a certain length.

From an administrator’s perspective, different data sets were not automatically linked. For example, a request to the central office was required to link a table of attendance by student name with a table of MCAS score by student name. Principals also had to click through numerous choices within X2 before seeing any data at all. While queries to a busy central office could get a data report from staff, getting new data on demand -- during a staff meeting, for immediate discussion -- had not been feasible. 2010-11 principal Jason DeFalco explained that often, he was in meetings where people had to pull folders out to compare different spreadsheets on the same young people.

Finally, while some afterschool providers have direct access to X2, many don’t, meaning they had trouble knowing basic information like whether students who were coming to afterschool were going to school. For that reason, some important data fields were not kept in X2 at all yet, like the afterschool program in which children were enrolled or their attendance in that program. These providers typically kept their information in separate computer databases or even on paper. Again and again, people voiced the need to see all the data in one place.

And perhaps most interesting, the existing X2 system was set up only to house student data -- not to help people talk about it. In talking about our dashboard prototypes with parents, the major feature everyone emphasized was the ability to immediately comment ON data, rather than simply “look at it.”

Our dashboard conversations with DeFalco and Vadhera showed us that all our data did not come from the same place. Test score growth and years at Healey had to be calculated based on other data in X2, and crucial data fields were not kept in X2 at all, i.e., MEPA scores, ELL and IEP status, home language, and afterschool program. Because data in X2 was also not “linked,” or organized in the same way we wanted for our dashboard, our technologist, Seth Woodworth, spend lots of time building “tubes” from the different parts of the district’s X2 database to our dashboards. Incorporating this data into our dashboards impressed upon us how much work, by many different people at the school, was necessary to track comprehensive data on any student.

We ultimately had to leave out some data we considered using because it was not yet kept in X2 (e.g., afterschool attendance, and specific in-school tutoring services students received). If our dashboards prove useful and become adopted by the school, staff can reconsider whether they want to enter additional fields into X2.

=='''Development Process==

From the very beginning, in the 2009-2010 school year, we collaborated with a range of Healey community members to design the dashboard’s user interface. As it turned out, Greg Nadeau, Somerville resident and Healey dad, had already made a color-coded Excel spreadsheet for the Healey Principal the year before we began work on the dashboard. It was an early Excel version of what later became our Administrator Dashboard View (what we came to call the Admin View). Here’s the earliest version of our Admin View:

[[Image:Greg_nadeau_view.jpg]]

Before we made the dashboard version of this view “live” by connecting it to X2, the school’s main need at the time was entering updated data into the Excel spreadsheet -- by hand. We knew that we would eventually develop a dashboard to automatically transfer data from X2, but the school needed to integrate the data sets immediately. So Susan Klimczak, from the South End Technology Center at Tent City, who would later become the lead organizer for the eportfolio project, did some valiant handiwork, assisted by colleague Al Willis. They cleaned up the current year’s spreadsheet and added new data typically not kept in X2 that the principal also wanted to see, like afterschool enrollment. We also had some regular meetings via phone conference with Greg and the principal to consider the patterns the principal wanted to see and the new "fields" for data that the principal felt needed to be created permanently in the district student information system (e.g., attendance in the afterschool programs. Afterschool programs weren't keeping this data in Somerville's core data system, X2, and still don’t.)

'''Turning point: The Teacher View

Josh Wairi, a 5th grade teacher at the Healey, got interested in the dashboard design when we stopped by his classroom one day after school in the winter of 2011. Looking together at his computer and printouts, we realized he was already creating spreadsheets of student data from X2 by hand. He was interested in quickly displaying and sorting basic data, to supplement his face-to-face and phone conversations with students and parents. His work showed us the need for what would become the “Teacher View,” a version of the Administrator View in which all the students come from the same homeroom.

Between this stage and the final version of the admin and teacher views (below), Mica, Seth, and Jedd met with Principal DeFalco several times during the 2010-2011 year and new Principal Vadhera beginning during the summer of 2011 to figure out the highest priority data fields for the admin view and to brainstorm potential uses. Based on DeFalco’s feedback, and with Seth’s programming skill, we developed a dashboard to automatically transfer data from X2 to a user-friendly view. Seeing Greg’s initial prototype, above, sparked DeFalco to suggest additional data fields: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores (English language learner assessments), IEP status, and afterschool program name (in the end, we did not add program name to the dashboard, because it was never made a real field in X2.) From this feedback, we developed the view below (names are fictional to ensure anonymity):

[[Image:Schooldash.jpg]]

All data fields are visible on one screen – so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. With Vadhera, over the summer of 2011, we brainstormed additional uses for the admin staff, which are described below in the second-to-last ¡Ahas!, “Data really can launch a conversation.”

'''Turning Point: Making the report card online and interactive
Stories of parents and afterschool providers trying to communicate with teachers about students’ report cards prompted us to push forward on an “Individual View” that included the report card instead of just absences, grades, and test scores. Mica, Seth, Josh, and Jedd had many meetings in the spring of 2011 to brainstorm the design for this view, considering parent needs for accessibility and common communication challenges between teachers and parents. Josh was a critical resource on these issues.

We had also been inspired by the New Visions for New Schools project, which has had success with a view that gives parents and students a quick understanding of student performance on quantifiable measures. (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf) Compared with New Visions' view, we wanted to include the additional feature of allowing parents - and afterschool providers - to comment on any child's progress, send these comments to the teacher, and begin a conversation about how to support the student at home and in school. New Visions emphasizes a verbal agreement between family and teacher, called an “Improvement Plan,” so we created space on the dashboard page to write down this agreement. In our initial prototype, we did this by adding actual “Improvement Plan” text boxes in the right-hand side of the screen:

[[Image: New visions view.jpg]]

As we continued to develop the dashboard and add new types of basic data for viewing, we wanted to keep all the info on a single page for easy access, but new developments convinced us to spread the info out across several pages. At the time we were designing the “Individual View,” the District was ceasing to assign its elementary students numerical grades, or their equivalents on the typical A, B, C scale, and moving to a standards-based K-6 report card that asked teachers to grade students as proficient on a range of grade-level skills. So, we made Somerville's new K-6 report card (handed out on paper to families) online and color-coded. We also decided that we wanted the text boxes to prompt more of an ongoing conversation, rather than a formal quarterly agreement. So, we put these text boxes next to each chunk of data, with a prompt embedded in the “save comment” click button to encourage parents to write comments or questions. With the help of local technologist Evan Burchard, whom Seth recruited, we developed a revised version. The image below includes a sample tutor comment. That’s because in the months to come, we would realize that any approved viewer of the dashboard could comment:

[[Image:Individual view grades.jpg]]

As we added the report card to the dashboard, we realized it was substantial enough that it needed its own page (above). In order to make the individual view as accessible as possible, even to families that are not used to looking at lots of quantitative data in one place, we spread the rest of the individual view’s information across several other pages, the names of which are visible as tabs at the top of each page. The individual view is now organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs allows the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile. We combined info about the student’s attendance and MCAS and MAP scores into the Individual View, which also includes the teacher’s quarterly summary comments from the report card:

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T23:05:39Z

209.6.84.160:

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project.

=The Details of the Work=
'''The expanded story behind our efforts, our communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and our turning points!

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project.

'''Starting off, and developing our goals:

As we began the OneVille Project back in summer 2009, we proposed to create a “dashboard” displaying basic data linking many youth- and child-related databases in the city. That was because many policymakers and researchers have a sense these days that the more data seen by more people, the better (see our [[Research Base]] page). But we quickly became unsure that “seeing everything” on young people was necessarily good – and especially, not clearly necessary at the level of the individual, family, teacher, and school administrator (does a teacher actually need to know a student’s police record in order to serve him better? Who exactly should see health data on children?). And anyway, the district was first interested in getting all of its own basic data viewable, quickly -- and that’s what we ended up working on in the end.

We also moved away from multi “sector”-database linking because SomerPromise, the Mayor's new site-based initiative to provide comprehensive youth services, was also interested in tackling the issue of linking databases across agencies, and we felt they were better positioned to pursue that goal even as we worked to lay groundwork for the effort by creating administrative and family-level views of school data alone. So, the goal became to create a simple data display that could help educators and families of youth in a single school see some basic data from district’s data warehousing software, Aspen X2, in a single view. This included creating a translated display easily understandable by an immigrant parent.

Throughout, we also became convinced that a dashboard shouldn’t just show data – it should help people communicate about it. Our rationale: Data displays in schools have traditionally been a) on paper and b) one-way. Think a report card or a quarterly report on one’s “scores”: schools or districts just “display” student scores to students and parents or show parents their child’s absences. Since OneVille’s goal is to support diverse partners in running communication about pursuing the success of young people, we 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.

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

In talking to families, teachers, and other service providers, we realized that just "getting data" on a student is never enough: people need to then converse (online, in person, or otherwise) about how the young person is doing and how they might be assisted. Just knowing how many days a child is absent is the first step, but then you need to have a conversation about why and what to do about it!

=='''The community’s need for the work==

Our work was shaped by a number of insights about necessary communications at the levels of student and family, teacher and classroom, school, and community.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Our dashboard sits “above” X2, the district’s current database, and displays its data in a more easily readable format for more people.

Parents, teachers, and afterschool providers all had a range of concerns about the accessibility of the data as stored in the district’s current database, Aspen X2:

[[Image:Aspen_X2_3.jpg|Aspen X2 screenshot]]

At the Healey School, older students and parents can log into X2, the student information system, to see updates on their grades, absences, etc. But many don't know that they do have passwords, and students told us they often forgot them. Any dashboard needs a password too, though, so it was really other issues that made a dashboard seem necessary: more importantly, once some of these users would get to X2, they found the format of the data there hard to understand. In particular, information isn't translated for non-English speakers.

When a teacher logged into X2, for another example, it was hard to see any student’s growth over time (i.e., test score growth) As Josh pointed out, test scores are kept in pure chronological order and since students take many tests, it was hard for anyone looking at X2 to see growth on a single test from year to year. Further, the “fields,” or “boxes,” keeping data in X2 didn’t have calculations like test score growth (they just showed one score, then the next). (Our technologist, Seth Woodworth, spent lots of time building “tubes” to make the dashboard automatically calculate this growth.) While the new report card importantly had sections for comments by teachers, those comments -- on particular skills listed on the report card -- only could be chosen from a drop-down list. Teachers could add longer summary comments on student progress only once per quarter, in the days when report cards “open” for updating and before they “close.” X2 also cuts off teacher comments at a certain length.

From an administrator’s perspective, different data sets were not automatically linked. For example, a request to the central office was required to link a table of attendance by student name with a table of MCAS score by student name. Principals also had to click through numerous choices within X2 before seeing any data at all. While queries to a busy central office could get a data report from staff, getting new data on demand -- during a staff meeting, for immediate discussion -- had not been feasible. 2010-11 principal Jason DeFalco explained that often, he was in meetings where people had to pull folders out to compare different spreadsheets on the same young people.

Finally, while some afterschool providers have direct access to X2, many don’t, meaning they had trouble knowing basic information like whether students who were coming to afterschool were going to school. For that reason, some important data fields were not kept in X2 at all yet, like the afterschool program in which children were enrolled or their attendance in that program. These providers typically kept their information in separate computer databases or even on paper. Again and again, people voiced the need to see all the data in one place.

And perhaps most interesting, the existing X2 system was set up only to house student data -- not to help people talk about it. In talking about our dashboard prototypes with parents, the major feature everyone emphasized was the ability to immediately comment ON data, rather than simply “look at it.”

Our dashboard conversations with DeFalco and Vadhera showed us that all our data did not come from the same place. Test score growth and years at Healey had to be calculated based on other data in X2, and crucial data fields were not kept in X2 at all, i.e., MEPA scores, ELL and IEP status, home language, and afterschool program. Because data in X2 was also not “linked,” or organized in the same way we wanted for our dashboard, our technologist, Seth Woodworth, spend lots of time building “tubes” from the different parts of the district’s X2 database to our dashboards. Incorporating this data into our dashboards impressed upon us how much work, by many different people at the school, was necessary to track comprehensive data on any student.

We ultimately had to leave out some data we considered using because it was not yet kept in X2 (e.g., afterschool attendance, and specific in-school tutoring services students received). If our dashboards prove useful and become adopted by the school, staff can reconsider whether they want to enter additional fields into X2.

=='''Development Process==

From the very beginning, in the 2009-2010 school year, we collaborated with a range of Healey community members to design the dashboard’s user interface. As it turned out, Greg Nadeau, Somerville resident and Healey dad, had already made a color-coded Excel spreadsheet for the Healey Principal the year before we began work on the dashboard. It was an early Excel version of what later became our Administrator Dashboard View (what we came to call the Admin View). Here’s the earliest version of our Admin View:

[[Image:Greg_nadeau_view.jpg]]

Before we made the dashboard version of this view “live” by connecting it to X2, the school’s main need at the time was entering updated data into the Excel spreadsheet -- by hand. We knew that we would eventually develop a dashboard to automatically transfer data from X2, but the school needed to integrate the data sets immediately. So Susan Klimczak, from the South End Technology Center at Tent City, who would later become the lead organizer for the eportfolio project, did some valiant handiwork, assisted by colleague Al Willis. They cleaned up the current year’s spreadsheet and added new data typically not kept in X2 that the principal also wanted to see, like afterschool enrollment. We also had some regular meetings via phone conference with Greg and the principal to consider the patterns the principal wanted to see and the new "fields" for data that the principal felt needed to be created permanently in the district student information system (e.g., attendance in the afterschool programs. Afterschool programs weren't keeping this data in Somerville's core data system, X2, and still don’t.)

'''Turning point: The Teacher View

Josh Wairi, a 5th grade teacher at the Healey, got interested in the dashboard design when we stopped by his classroom one day after school in the winter of 2011. Looking together at his computer and printouts, we realized he was already creating spreadsheets of student data from X2 by hand. He was interested in quickly displaying and sorting basic data, to supplement his face-to-face and phone conversations with students and parents. His work showed us the need for what would become the “Teacher View,” a version of the Administrator View in which all the students come from the same homeroom.

Between this stage and the final version of the admin and Teacher views, belowMica, Seth, and Jedd met with Principal DeFalco several times during the 2010-2011 year and new Principal Vadhera beginning during the summer of 2011 to figure out the highest priority data fields for the admin view and to brainstorm potential uses. Based on DeFalco’s feedback, and with Seth’s programming skill, we developed a dashboard to automatically transfer data from X2 to a user-friendly view. Seeing Greg’s initial prototype, above, sparked DeFalco to suggest additional data fields: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores (English language learner assessments), IEP status, and afterschool program name (in the end, we did not add program name to the dashboard, because it was never made a real field in X2.) From this feedback, we developed the view below:

[[Image:Schooldash.jpg]]

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T22:49:44Z

209.6.84.160: /* Development Process */

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T22:47:26Z

209.6.84.160: /* The community’s need for the work */

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T22:25:34Z

209.6.84.160:

Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support

2011-10-30T21:48:46Z

209.6.84.160: /* Our work, and our ¡Ahas! */

[[Image:Juneresearchday.jpg|thumb|Teachers and students analyzing texting in June 2011]]

''Written by Mica Pollock, Uche Amaechi, Maureen Robichaux, and Ted O'Brien for the texting project, with input from students at Full Circle/Next Wave

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In the texting pilot, we all set forth to learn how texting might enable supporters in each young person’s life to communicate rapidly with the young person -- both about how he/she is doing personally and academically and about actions that might enable his/her success.

[[Image:Textingresearchday.jpeg|thumb|Students and teachers analyzing (anonymized) examples of student-teacher texts: Research Day at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, April 2011]]

Of the various technologies in our lives, it is cell phones that are with us all day, and keep us most connected and available. Texting (often called “SMS”) and other mobile text based communications (like instant messaging) give people particular control over when and where they communicate. In theory, people can review and respond to texts at their leisure--in the evening from home, or over the weekend after sports practice. But a text is particularly hard to ignore, and responses to texts often arrive in seconds -- which is why in summer 2010, Somerville students told us to try texting for rapid youth support (see the full story [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here.]].

They were on to something: texting has been shown to be a particularly used channel for youth communication today. According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study on teenage use of mobile phones, teen use of texting has increased dramatically since 2006 (Campbell et al, 2010). Between 2006 and 2010, the percentage of all teens that used text messaging doubled from 27% to 54%. The only other communication medium that increased during those dates showed more muted gains: cell phone calls increased from 34-38% and the use of social networking sites increased from 21-25%. While calls remained a “critically important function” for teens, especially when communicating with parents, teens were clearly taking to texting in a much more dramatic way than any other communication medium. By 2009, the use of texting had increased among young people between the ages of 12 and 17: on average, older teens were even more likely to text than younger ones (Campbell et al, 2010). Furthermore, the Pew Polls have found that 70% of teens use texting to do "things related to school work," and a smaller but more dedicated 23% of teens use texting for school at least daily. Texting seems to be used more for general school-related communications than for detailed discussions of assignments and homework: 30% of all students and 45% of poor students specifically report never texting about school assignments (Campbell et al, 2010).

In its small character capacity, texting may not be an obvious choice for discussions of the details of homework. But by providing a channel for anytime sharing of basic information and typically informal, individualized information about life and school experiences, we thought texting might be able to support the sort of ongoing personalized attention we know is necessary for supporting young people in schools.

Still, do a Google search for student-teacher texting and most of what you will find is fear: districts considering bans on texting or teachers quietly posting updates about their own personal experiences with trying it. Many view texting as an inappropriate mode of communication between teachers and students, for several main reasons. Even more a year ago than now, texting feels like a “youth”-owned medium. Also, because texting really feels like a private “tube” between two people, the sort of support texting can offer immediately seems particularly personal. That privacy is exactly what scares some people about misuse: teachers and students somehow seem more “alone together” while texting (even though private classroom conversations after school are equally “alone”). Texting also extends the boundaries of potential communication with students outside the school day and into teachers’ own afterschool lives.

Instead of just fearing texting, we decided to learn together what it could offer public school communities. So, we – teachers, researchers, and students -- rolled out a texting pilot with 40 students across multiple classrooms. As we describe in more detail [Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|[here,]] some teachers in Somerville weren’t ready to try texting for reaching their students; these students and teachers were. They really were pioneers in testing how a communication tool already in the hands of most young people in the building could be pulled in for everyday student support.

In some ways, our site -- Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative school -- is a special school: all teachers work in what our participating high school teacher Ted called “teacher-counselor mode” and expect personal support relationships as part of their job. Each teacher has a co-counseling group that meets twice a week, where he/she gets to know more about young people’s personal struggles. Teachers work in a “triangle” with clinicians and students’ other counselors. But really, teachers at FC/NW are simply encouraged by their school to build teacher-student support relationships, something every teacher has to do but may not have the time or the administrative support to do.

So far, we have been testing one-to-one (private) texting between teachers and students, and secondarily, between students and eight graduate student mentors from the Harvard Graduate School of Education who helped us connect to the students to check in. We’re using Google Voice, a free service that records all of the texts in teachers’ inboxes. This allowed two researchers in the group (Uche and Mica) to review the texts along with teachers to see if they were helpful -- with students’ advance, overall permission. (GoogleVoice also gives teachers a separate phone number, so they’re not using their personal phone.)

Since starting, we’ve seen student-teacher texting after and before school take off successfully with middle and high school youth. In the fall, we plan to test ways to enable youth and a "team" of their chosen supporters (including afterschool providers, peers, and family members) to communicate about any topic via group texting.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas! and turning points did we have over time?
-------

[[Image:textingteachersteam.jpg|thumb|Mo and Ted, texting teacher pioneers, with Uche and Mica. . .and donuts]]

Design based research is usually about proceeding in very clear “stages” to test something. As stated earlier, we wanted to test rapid support communications among a “team” of youths’ chosen supporters. We began with testing a school-based online social network and eventually moved toward testing one-to-one texting instead, with the vision of testing out “team” texting next.

So, our work proceeded in stages and also in a rolling manner over two years, based on ongoing reactions to students’ and teachers’ insights and interests re. support communications that might assist youth.

Throughout, we kept our core questions constant. Who needs to share which information with whom, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome? And, we came to ask: how might texting enable (or not enable) the rapid exchanges of information and caring often so needed to support young people?

Note: Unlike in our ePortfolio pilot, where the goal was to create ePortfolios that would succeed and stick at Somerville High School, we decided in this case not to “make sure texting works, by doing whatever is necessary to make it work.” Instead, we wanted to explore how teachers and students would use (or NOT use) texting in youth support, if they were just explicitly invited to text for school-related communication. We also wanted to know if some type or series of communications could help make a young person more connected to school or more successful academically.

So, in a nutshell, we offered the channel and waited to see what everyone would do with it. We didn’t push any particular use of the texting, but instead kept talking about actual uses. Mo, Ted, and the students became a research team with Uche, Mica, and the HGSE students, together exploring the use of texting in rapid youth support. We put our Ford support resources into stipending teachers $25/hr (2 hrs/week) for their extra time piloting the tool and analyzing data, paying kids back with food and $25/each for a formal “research day,” and supporting Uche to coordinate the pilot. For course credit, HGSE students checked in on the students and acted as anytime mentors for young people who wanted to share questions or thoughts via texts. We also agreed to line up tutors or mentors for anyone who wanted one and did for several students—though as we mention in the [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!||full story]], logistics and low interests later fizzled that plan.

We held regular conversations with students and teachers to analyze how the texting was going for them. Eight HGSE students informally interviewed the FC/NW students a few times a month, over donuts at the school. Uche and Mica talked with Ted and Mo, Uche texted regularly with Ted and Mo himself, and Mica took a “team” of students on as a texting partner. Everyone was invited to analyze the texting conversations together in two research events, the first held at Harvard and the second held at the FC/NW building.

Our main '''¡Ahas!''' over time have been these:

'''MAIN ¡Aha!: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.

'''MAIN ¡Aha!: Texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate. People can use regular phones, smart phones, and computers to communicate via text message.

'''¡Aha! Go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.

'''Most of the actual texts that prove these points can be found [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here,]] but we wanted to tempt you by showing you a few more examples of what supportive teacher-student texting can look like:

:Teacher: Everything ok? 9:30 AM

:Student: Ted? 10:39 AM

:Teacher: Yup 11:02 AM

:Student: Everythings alright I guess im gonna b in tm .. Is there anything I can do to put my grade up for your class 11:05 AM

:Teacher: Be on time tomorrow, we'll talk then. 11:06 AM

:Student: Alright 11:09 AM

:Teacher: [Student,] do you still have the math book I gave you for homework? If you do let me know and [teacher] too 2:38 PM

:Student: Ya I do 2:59 PM

:Teacher: Use it! 3:27 PM

:Student: Ok. I will 3:31 PM

:Student: I just left my house right now so I'm going to b late 7:47 AM

:Teacher: And I need to know this? 7:48 AM

:Teacher: Hurry up! 7:49 AM

:Student: Because I don't want you to worry 7:49 AM

:Teacher: You miss school regularly silly goose 7:51 AM

:Student: I came in all this week and collected points 7:54 AM

:Teacher: Get here, we can celebrate 7:55 AM

:Student: Hahaha okk I'm on cross street now 7:58 AM

:Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

:Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

:Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

:Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

''' Want to see more texts? Click [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here!]]

In discussions throughout the year and in several focused data analysis meetings, student and teacher participants argued that texting had two key benefits: individualized, timely student support and the ability to strengthen student-teacher relationships. Students argued that supportive texts from teachers were giving them the motivation or information necessary to come to school on time, complete homework, remain aware of requirements, and participate in afterschool activities. Over the semester, we also saw texting teachers and students having more frequent, and deepening, conversations about school commitments and life struggles, both via text and then in person. In reviewing texts between students and university mentors, we have seen that afterschool supporters can also use texting to build stronger relationships with students and to communicate regularly about careers, jobs, and school persistence.

In sum: most school districts are out to regulate and restrict texting and fear student-teacher texting as somehow inappropriate. We’ve seen that texting can simply extend relationship-building and student support outside of school hours. But this raises several overall questions for public schools. One: adults’ time. If gluing a relationship together outside of the school day helps young people do better in school, is it “worth” teachers’ time? Two: Where do the school walls end? If a teacher supports young people’s school success through wakeup texts or afterschool reminders, is this an appropriate reach into the home or out of the classroom? Three: appropriate student-teacher relationships. If good teaching requires real relationships between students and teachers – a form of friendship with role boundaries-- how can they communicate via today’s most “friendly” media but still within age- and role-appropriate bounds of partnership? It may be that we need to redefine “appropriate” student-teacher relationships in the digital age. As Shelia, age 17, put it in this pilot, texting definitely put students and teachers more “on the same level.” Texting was definitely a “youth medium” when we started, but it may not be for long!

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Ahas! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here!]]''''''

Our ¡Ahas! about texting included the following.

'''¡Aha! Texting works when you can’t reach young people any other way for time-sensitive information.

'''¡Aha! Texting helps when students don’t have home phones or literally aren’t in school.

'''¡Aha! Texting can support communication about a wide variety of school issues.

'''¡Aha! We began to see that students and teachers can build personal relationships via text.

'''¡Aha! Fundamental academic support, personal support, and light banter can occur in the same conversation.

'''¡Aha! Texting can build a relationship for school even if you are not talking about school.

'''¡Aha! Texting didn’t supplant face to face conversation. Often, the text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation.

'''¡Aha! As relationships grow, they are documented in texts!

'''¡Aha! Normalizing texting as something students and teachers can do makes it easier to strike up a relationship with a young person.

'''¡Aha! The style of texts can put students and teachers “on the same level.”

'''¡Aha! The many emotions possible via text can give students and teachers a range of ways to share their feelings.

'''¡Aha! Concerns about students being “inappropriate” with the channel may be overblown.

'''¡Aha! Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring because they demonstrated effort by both students and teachers to respond to the other.

'''¡Aha! Texting’s time commitment shows caring and builds relationship. But it also -- takes time!

'''¡Aha! Of course, if your support network uses your phone to reach you, you need a phone.

'''¡Aha! In our brief test of texting between HGSE students and the FC/NW students, we began to see that texting can support ongoing career mentoring, too.

'''¡Aha! Finally, face to face mentoring meetings can be really hard to schedule, making texting even more sensible.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We have successfully supported a pilot of student-teacher texting at Full Circle/Next Wave and have dozens of students and four new teachers excited about continuing. The principal is interested in expanding use of texting to include other current and former teachers within the school. While many teachers still didn’t know how to use a cell phone, some are newly starting to text. We joked that maybe the principal himself would start using our texting “blast” to message his entire staff!

Both students and teachers say that we’ve all demonstrated that texting is a possible tool for communication with young people that mixes personal support, academic support, and everyday banter. We have realized so far that texting is a very natural and important channel not only for check-ins and updates not possible during the school day, but for a key, perhaps ultimate support: building a relationship between student and teacher or adult mentor.

At our April Research Day at Harvard, Obens, one of the students, summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year: “it shows connection. It’s really helpful --- it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on this schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Later in the school year, Obens would point out that texting helped him focus overall on school, but couldn’t keep him focused during class – that was his next frontier for self-improvement. Many students also made clear that while improving student-teacher communication was key, linking in other people in their lives was crucial too. As Mica wrote to herself in February after a group conversation that followed texts with several individual girls, “note: several times in this conversation I felt the need to tell others in the school, things that I was texting about w/ an individual kid, so that others could be pulled in for the collective support.”

So, our next step is to see how texting works with new student and teacher users and also, to test texting “teams.” In fall 2011, we’ll continue teacher-student texting with additional teachers and youth, start teacher-full class texting, and test group texting between chosen “teams” of supporters around individual youth. We’ll see how and if multiple supporters take the opportunity for rapid communications about students’ personal needs.

As we test group texting among “teams” of students’ chosen supporters this fall, we’re going with youth-constructed teams of supporters and we’ll see where they take a group texting tool. We have lots of questions. Is the private and personal nature of communication via one-to-one text a key to its use for rapid student support? If so, can a group text together for youth support, or not? Throughout the pilot, one-to-one texting continued to feel particularly private -- which was, perhaps, why so much relationship-building was possible over it. So, can a “team” use texting to communicate rapidly about student support, or will the “group” communication make texting less desirable? Which communications should be private, which public to a “team”? And who should be in a texting “team”? As one student said, she was now up for texting teachers but not for having her mom aware of her school related “business.” As Ted put it, to “honor the kids’ sense of privacy,” “which communications should go to parents? Which to kids? which to both?”

This will remain our core inquiry in Phase 2 as we move forward to test “team” texting.

Again, we’ll offer youth and “team” the channel and learn together what they do with it!

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:

:-In your school, when students have personal questions or needs, are there ways for them to rapidly reach their supporters?
:-How do teachers supplement their often-limited interactions with students during the school day?
:-How much do teachers communicate with students and families outside of the classroom?
:-What type of relationships and interactions do teachers have with their students, both in and outside of the classroom?
:-What policies, structures, and norms do teachers and students have for interacting outside of class?
:-Could texting help with rapid youth support? What are your reservations about texting, and how might these be addressed?

===Technological how-tos===

Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

'''Setting up Google Voice (screen shots, etc.!) Guidance on this coming soon from Uche!

Google Voice is a free web based phone and text messaging service provided by Google. Google Voice provides a separate phone number that teachers can give out to students. The use of a separate number helps preserve the privacy of teachers’ personal phone numbers. This separate number, coupled with some of the service’s advanced features, such as number blocking, provide the teacher with an added sense of privacy and security. Finally, we chose the Google Voice service because it allowed multiple people—teacher and researchers—access to the same account, providing a general transparency and accountability and allowing Uche and Mica as co-researchers to review the teachers’ text communications by agreement. Beyond the research, the teachers also found it useful to be able to review their own texting exchanges.

With Google Voice, teachers can view and send texts from a computer without texting charges. Teachers can also take advantage of a computer’s larger screen and familiar interface to view texts arranged by student or time, and easily search through their history of texts. Teachers can check received messages on their smart phones via specially designed apps, or they can choose to have the service forward any texts to their feature phones’ regular text messaging accounts. (A feature phone is a cell phone that does not have installable apps from an app store.)

The simplest add on to Google Voice so far was to create a one to many “blast” that the teachers could use to message their entire class. Seth, our developer, connected the teachers’ Google Voice accounts to group texting software made with the Twilio API, to afford teacher-whole class messaging. The setup created a proxy phone number for a new “group” of all of the teacher’s students. The teacher only had to send a message to that number and the associated students would all receive the message. (With regular Google Voice, you can only text 5 people at a time). However, because of the difficulty in maintaining and updating the custom designed software, we will be trying out commercial software such as GroupMe or Beluga for group and whole-class texting going forward. These application/services, like Google Voice, can operate through an app on a smart phone, or by forwarding messages to phone numbers on feature phones.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2011-10-30T21:46:50Z

209.6.84.160: /* Our work, and our ¡Ahas! */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Tona Delmonico, Gina d'Haiti, and Ana Maria Nieto for the Parent Connector project, with input from parents across the Healey School (particularly Consuelo Perez, Lupe Ojeda, Sofia Perez, Maria Carvalho, Ivanete Calmon, Veronaise Chaiki, Will Thalheimer, Tracy and Dave Sullivan, Michael Quan), and Jedd Cohen.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

[[Image:Maria and Seth.jpg|thumb|Maria, Connector to Portuguese-speaking parents, and Seth, local technologist, working together on a hotline recording]]

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

At Somerville’s Healey School (K-8), as in many U.S. schools, parents hail from across the globe and speak many languages. Language barriers keep parents from being equally informed about school issues, events, and even educational opportunities. So do disparities in tech access, tech training, and time -- as well as gaps in personal relationship and connections. Everyone at the Healey talked about needing better school-home and parent-parent communication, particularly to fully include immigrant families, families without computer access/knowledge, and families who couldn’t or didn’t show up often in person at the school.

So, throughout the schoolwide communication working group, we operated from a central principle already core to the Healey School: a child can’t be educated as effectively if parents aren’t included as key partners in the project. So, schools should ensure access to school information and pull all parents into dialogue about improving their children’s school experience. Info out, input in!

The Healey School enrolls a full U.S. range of families with different communication habits and needs. Some email the principal and Superintendent regularly. Some parents have no computers and no internet. A listserv has long enrolled only some. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. For many, parent teacher conferences require interpreters, and scheduling those interpreters itself is a structural communication need. One Portuguese-speaking dad worked such long hours he didn't even have time to come to school to post a sign saying he wanted to find and pay another parent to help him drive his daughter to school. One Spanish-speaking parent told her Connector she’d been trying for a year to meet with her child’s teacher in person.

In contrast, some families, particularly English-speaking families, volunteer many hours in classrooms during the school day and so get regular access to their child’s teacher. Many such families also are on committees that meet after school and so, take the opportunity then to contribute ideas to the school. Over the years, we saw that families who saw each other regularly at face to face school events also made friends, joined listservs, signed up in directories, and showed up at next events.

As we describe below, we worked on several strategies to support parents to share ideas and information (Reading Nights, Parent Issue Dialogues) and then focused particularly on the challenge of multilingual communication, because language barriers particularly have excluded many Healey parents from full participation. The Multilingual Coffee Hour, begun in 2009, was our first explicitly multilingual effort; then, in 2010-11, the Parent Connector Network has focused fully on reaching out to parents who speak the district's 3 main languages other than English: Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. We've also been working to build personal relationships between bilingual parents and recent immigrant parents, in order to bring more voices into school debates and more people into school events and leadership as well as help the school respond more quickly to parent needs.

Begun in Winter 2010, the Parent Connector Network is now a parent-led effort (in partnership with school administrators and staff) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) to more recently immigrated parents via a phone tree. The Connectors have come to also use Google forms to gather school information, Google spreadsheets to track calls with parents, and a multilingual hotline we made using free software, to help ensure that information reaches immigrant and low-income families who share the school.

We are currently working with 3 Spanish-speaking, 3 Portuguese-speaking, and 2 Haitian Creole-speaking Parent Connectors. Each Connector is asked to call approximately 10 other families once a month to share key information from the principal/school and to ask questions about any issues parents are facing. The Connectors are also on-call to these parents during the school year to help them find answers to both general and specific questions or concerns they may have about their child’s school. (One Connector also got calls this summer -- about summer school enrollment and about how to reach the district’s Parent Information Center to enroll a new cousin in a school.)

We also innovated the role of volunteer “Translators of the Month” who can help translate school information for a hotline made by local technologists. That translated material can then be used for other school media (listserv, handouts, flyers, etc.).

We also argued for creating a part-time liaison role (five paid hours!) for one staff Connector so that she can respond appropriately to serious or ongoing parent needs -- beyond what a volunteer parent can or should do. She also will help with a key structural issue: scheduling interpreters. We’re piloting the full combination in 2011-12.

[[Image:(2)Slide1.jpg|Slide1.jpg]]
[[Image:(2)Slide2.jpg|Slide2.jpg]]
[[Image:(2)Slide3.jpg|Slide3.jpg]]

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas! and turning points did we have over time?
-------
As a multilingual group of parents and staff (a few of whom speak only English), it has taken us two years to fully understand:

1) the barriers in the way of English learners' participation in English-dominant schools;

2) the sort of systemic communication "infrastructure" necessary to include more immigrant parents as partners in the project of supporting young people.

Our main '''¡Ahas!''' over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! Along with strong intentions to include all families, diverse schools need systems -- infrastructure -- for getting information to everyone and input from everyone.

'''¡Aha! Overall, we’ve learned that committed and diverse parents can be expert innovators of communication infrastructure for including all parents because they have a full understanding of communication barriers.

'''¡Aha! In a multilingual school and district in particular, improving communications -- and strengthening relationships between families and educators -- requires creating a standing infrastructure for effectively tapping a key local resource: bilingualism.

Before we started working on the Parent Connector Network in Winter 2011, we worked with families and teachers in other efforts to improve parent-school and parent-parent connections. Work informing the Parent Connector Network began in a 2009-10 series of Reading Nights and Parent Dialogues, and a Multilingual Coffee Hour that continued in 2010-11 as part of the Parent Connector Network infrastructure. We learned a huge amount in that work and we built relationships that enabled the development of the Parent Connector Network. Click [[Expanded story: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|here]] for the full backstory!

Most of all, we had to make friends with other parents and staff who cared deeply about including everyone. These friends became key partners in innovation! Together, we came to learn:

'''¡Aha! Because each innovation we started needed other components to work effectively, we have come to think in terms of creating an "infrastructure" for schoolwide communication (and low-cost translation and interpretation in particular) in a school.

We've also seen throughout that,

'''¡Aha! The people who share a school can, will, and should volunteer their time to help the school and other families communicate. But only up to a certain point!

===Communication and implementation ¡Aha!s, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Ahas! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|here!]]'''

Our ¡Aha!s about schoolwide communication included the following.

''READING NIGHT AHAS:

[[Image:Running up the Healey stairs to a Reading Night.jpg|thumb|Running up the Healey stairs to a Reading Night]]

'''¡Aha! The success of any school event relies on school-home communication.

[[Image:Consuelopizza.jpg|thumb|Consuelo, mastermind of the Multilingual Coffee Hour, and her OneVille pizza: our best Reading Night advertisement]]

'''¡Aha! Sharing info and building relationships with busy parents often requires face to face contact, despite the fact that it’s time-consuming.

'''¡Aha! Bringing kids along to parent events helps glue together parents in a common experience -- even as it also distracts them from sharing information with other parents!

'''¡Aha! There’s no way that all parents will or can show up to face-to-face events. So, any event needs a plan for getting information to parents who didn’t show up.

'''¡Aha! If prepping face to face events from scratch takes too much volunteer time from people, they lose momentum. At the same time, the slog of preparing for face to face events can build friendships that can seed real change.

''MULTILINGUAL COFFEE HOUR AHAS:

'''¡Aha! The massive local resource of parent bilingualism!

'''¡Aha! Making parent gatherings explicitly multilingual encourages speakers of languages other than English to ask questions and offer opinions.

[[Image:Dave.jpg|thumb|Dave, multilingual coffee hour enthusiast and 2011 PTA president]]

''PARENT-PARENT ISSUE DIALOGUE AHAS:

'''¡Aha! Many parents have few or no opportunities to talk to each other or to decisionmakers in organized settings, about major issues in their school. This means that their ideas and energy for improvement go untapped.

'''¡Aha! If tech channels for dialogue are available only to some in a school, those not on the channel don’t get equal access to the dialogue. (Example: a listserv that only some parents are on.)

'''TURNING POINT: With the Healey in the midst of brainstorming all sorts of changes to its everyday structures, we parents focused for 2010-11 on improving infrastructure for schoolwide communication -- and on including immigrant parents in particular.

''PARENT CONNECTOR NETWORK AHAS:

'''¡Aha! Parents can be organized as communication links --”connectors” -- to other parents.

'''¡Aha! While asking how schools get info out, we also have to ask how they get input in! How do schools hear about and then respond to parents’ ongoing problems and concerns?

'''TURNING POINT: Focus on the most-blocked communication first. In this case, language barriers making communication particularly difficult.

'''¡Aha! To build trusting relationships, consider connecting parents to specific groups of other parents -- and when possible, build on the social relationships parents already have!

'''¡Aha! Innovation requires experimenting with communication solutions -- in our case, for getting school info “out” and parent input “in,” across boundaries of language.

'''¡Aha! It matters whose voice is heard over a public channel! Consider letting parents invite other parents to school events by recording the robocall in their language, so that listeners who speak that language feel more socially welcome.

'''¡Aha! Schools need systems for responding efficiently and publicly to common parent questions as they come up. Parents approaching staff one by one to ask basic questions isn’t efficient -- especially if parents need interpreters to do it.

'''¡Aha! Better systems are needed to get parents’ contact numbers to other parents! Otherwise, parent partnerships can’t easily happen.

'''¡Aha! Privacy and trust are key issues to be navigated carefully in broadening school-home communications. But, issues of privacy do mean that at times, it takes much longer for people to partner than they would otherwise. Consider an info form easily allowing parents to permit the use of their phone numbers for approved parent-parent contact.

'''¡Aha! Volunteers need communication infrastructure themselves, in order to make their own work easier. But it can’t be too techy or some volunteers will get turned off!

'''¡Aha! Only use tech tools if they truly enable participation. If they raise the barrier to participation, either don’t use them just yet or, train everyone to use them.

'''¡Aha! Innovate forms of communication that will reach the highest number of parents most quickly with ongoing resources and information. Blockages to quick information flow really do mean that children don’t get opportunities. In our case, we’re trying a hotline that allows people not on the internet, to call in for information. Meanwhile, we’ll train people on email so they can join the school listserv!

'''¡Aha! Go with the common denominator of parents’ tech skills to reach the highest number of parents most quickly with resources and information. Blockages to quick information flow really do mean that children don’t get opportunities. In the meantime, train parents on tech!

'''¡Aha! A key need in public information-sharing is TRIAGING information so it’s not overwhelming. Another is ORGANIZING the information that goes out, so that others can quickly digest it. Our solution: a Googledoc and Translators of the Month!

'''¡Aha! Creating “infrastructure” for interpretation and translation requires figuring out who to pay for what. Communication on individual parents’ serious personal needs may have to be covered by paid staff, freeing volunteers to be friends, info-sharers and links TO paid staff.

'''¡Aha! A key aspect of effectively using the local resource of bilingualism is creating infrastructure for scheduling interpreters. It’s really about getting the resource of bilingualism in the right place at the right time.

'''¡Aha! The people who share a school can, will, and should volunteer their time to help the school and other families communicate. But only up to a certain point.

'''¡Aha! Today, systems for getting information to multilingual families and input from all families can absolutely be improved using some very basic technology – if people are shown how to use it.

'''¡Aha! Tech -- even a phone -- just helps extend the ultimate resource: relationships. One of our Connectors had an ¡Aha! that others echoed across the OneVille Project: “My main conclusion is that relationships matter and they are what makes everything work.”

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We are proud to say that the Parent Connector vision and project is now part of the Healey School's school site plan. We have a core of volunteer Connectors making calls this fall, lead Connectors in each language, and two current/former HGSE graduate students working to support the effort while it solidifies. The new principal has agreed that one of our Connectors, Gina, already a young Creole-speaking staff member, will be supported by the school five hrs/week as a part-time parent liaison to handle parent needs forwarded by the Connectors and to oversee the multilingual communication process we’ve come up with.

[[Image:(2)Slide4.jpg|(2)Slide4.jpg]]

[[Image:(2)Slide5.jpg|(2)Slide5.jpg]]

Leo Burd, a new friend from MIT's Center for Civic Media, is finishing an improved version of our hotline so that Translators of the Month can easily upload updates this fall. We’re honing a Googledoc where school leaders put schoolwide information for Translators to translate on to the hotline. We’re also creating a Googledoc of basic contact info/citywide parent services info all Connectors need to know. We’ve helped the principal make her a fall parent communication form that will help parents sign up to get a Connector, make it easier to get parents’ phone numbers, and allow parents to record their preferences for contact (texting? listserv? classroom listserv?) and indicate whether they need email training. We’re also teaming up with PTA leaders, who will begin to offer email/listserv training to parents this fall to address this key barrier to schoolwide communication.

[[Image:(2)Slide7.jpg|(2)Slide7.jpg]]

Together, the Connectors (with advice from many other parents and staff consulted over the two years) fleshed out a list of components of the necessary “infrastructure” for multilingual communication. The Connectors themselves have become seen as a key local resource, as people willing to be on call to answer other parents' questions in their language and to (monthly) share information that requires more explanation.

In the Schoolwide Communication project in general, we repeatedly hit up against a core issue: how much time will parents volunteer to support connections between families, and between families and school? Schools can’t rely upon volunteers too much. A key issue we addressed in the Parent Connector Project was the line between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can and will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. How to tap those resources without overtaxing volunteers, and without asking volunteers to do the sort of work that really should be done by paid professionals?

We’ve been exploring a cost-effective hybrid of volunteer efforts to connect parents to other parents and “infrastructure” that includes paid school staff. So, in our case, we isolated an aspect of the infrastructure that volunteers couldn’t cover and argued that a bilingual staff member be employed part-time to cover it. We reasoned that volunteers shouldn't be asked to ensure that parents get Special Education services for their children or legal assistance for their families; paid staff in any district should be on top of such “case management.” But volunteers may be able to do something no staff member can do so easily: build friendships that glue people together as partners in student success.So, the task for the coming fall will be to figure out how and whether a very part-time liaison role serves the purpose.

Further, in a multilingual community where not everyone uses computers, some lack access to information because of translation gaps and some because of a gap in basic tech knowledge. We learned early on in our work in Somerville that the problem is not necessarily one of computer access (the nearby housing project has many computers) as much as one of training. Even English-speaking parents in the school’s magnet program didn't know how to get on its listserv. Now that the school’s programs have merged and the school is creating a schoolwide listerv, these issues will rise to the fore. And having people equally speak up on the common listserv, in whatever language, will be the next frontier of parent inclusion!

In Winter 2011, we attempted to hold a "get an Email" night at the Healey, but it wasn't well attended; this crucial puzzle piece needs further development and is one focus for fall. Ironically, if there isn't a good multilingual communication infrastructure, it's hard to get people out for any face to face email training event! This is what we mean when we say each infrastructure “component” is connected – and has to be fueled by an overall commitment to including all parents. Combining the Connector network with email training by the PTA may be a good solution, especially as the school goes from having a listserv only for the magnet program to a listserv for all. Especially in a community where there are many community-oriented technologists, there's really no reason why everyone eventually shouldn't have basic tech skills.

'''Our next step this fall is to to pilot the full infrastructure we’ve developed for multilingual communication, while adding in a next piece: PTA-run parent email/listserv training. We plan to:

:a) pilot use of our open source hotline, to support bilingual parent “Translators of the Month” to translate information about events, issues, and opportunities;
:b) finish testing our Parent Connector Network, in which bilingual parents make monthly calls to help get information to and input from immigrant and low-income families; Connectors will also invite parents to our Multilingual Coffee hour and to the hotline;
:c) test a model where a Parent Liaison follows up on specific parent needs, helps with scheduling interpreters, and coordinates Translators of the Month for the hotline;
:d) help create a sustainable model where the PTA trains parents to get Gmail accounts, use a school listserv, and use Google Translate to translate listserv information.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===
'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!
-------

Consider the current and needed schoolwide communication infrastructure at your school:

:➢ Can everyone who needs to get and share important school information, get and share it?
:➢ Where do you put school information so that everyone in the school can see it?
:➢ How do you share parent ideas around the school?
:➢ What system do you have for translation and interpretation, in particular?
:➢ How can you tap local bilingualism, either paying people to translate material or organizing bilingual volunteers to pitch in on translation and interpretation in a way that doesn't take too much of their time?
:➢ How can you build on parent-parent relationships to pull all parents into school events and conversation?
:➢ What tech training do parents need in order to get information? How could you help all parents get this training?
:➢ Which efforts at parent information should be a task for school staff rather than volunteers?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!
-------

We’re using a Googledoc as one organized place where the principal and school leaders put info that most needs translation each month. See http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html for instructions on starting a Googledoc. (Note: to use googledocs, users sometimes have to get gmail accounts.)

We use Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. And, to keep things simple, we now use the same spreadsheets for Connectors to record parents’ needs after they make calls home. See http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html for instructions on starting and using Google spreadsheets.

We used Google Translate for some first-pass translations, but bilingual parents still had to correct the translations. See http://translate.google.com/support/ for tips on using Google Translate.

We’ve experimented with robocalls home, using Connect-Ed, the district’s existing system for school-home calls.

Remember that in our case, we targeted robocalls to one language group at a time instead of recording all four at once, because robocalls often cut off after the first two languages (and because Portuguese and Haitian Creole were always last!). We also asked Connectors to record some robocalls in their friendly parent voices, which drew some parents to PTA night!

In April, we were still sitting at Seth’s computer talking into it -- see photo of Maria and Seth above! Or, those of us with Audacity on our computers could record from home and send Seth the files.

Leo Burd from the Center for Civic Media then made the full version that we are piloting in 2011-12. (Here's Leo talking about his VOIPDrupal software: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8NCRLCdPno&noredirect=1) Now, people can call it and easily record to it from any location. See here for Leo's explanations of the programming [[here].

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T21:44:17Z

209.6.84.160: /* Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points! */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there’s no reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately! Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Lots of people in Somerville talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To clarify: A typical district has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. However, many districts do not have any easy tools for quickly displaying that information to multiple partners at once or letting them sort the data for patterns.

In Somerville, administrators had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: People had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, the data is only in English, and viewers cannot comment ON the data.

Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

We decided to develop an open source solution for one simple reason: Open source tools can save districts lots of money. With open source, districts don’t have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use; they only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey parent Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera, and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin dashboards provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) complements this with additional student data that was identified by parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other. This view also gives parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment on the data and send these comments to the teacher, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs, covering grades, test scores, attendance, and teacher summary comments.

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

'''Our goal in 2011-12 is to pilot and tweak these three tools with educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We’ll explore the ways these tools can support teamwork among all these people – in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas! and turning points did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display. Otherwise people waste time flipping between file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

Our '''¡Aha! about data dashboards included the following:

In addition to our main ahas, we had other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards may enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email.

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. '''We’d need to continue this kind of outreach during a pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language.

The prototypes of the administrative and teacher views are complete, and the individual view is nearly complete. We planned to pilot our three “views” in fall, 2011 and report out what we learned. However, the young local technologist who created these great products to community specifications went so slowly on our limited budget that our grant dried up and we weren’t able to pilot them. One classroom’s teacher, families, students, and supporting teachers were ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers, but the developer’s slowness and unreliability prompted a district administrator to pull the plug on the pilot – so the crack in the infrastructure remains.

The lesson here involves the timeline of software development, and the risks associated with community-based design research: The working relationship with the community partner (e.g., the school district) becomes asymmetrical when developing a software application from scratch - lots of work on the developer's end without immediate results for the community partner, potentially leaving them with “cold feet” by the time the product is ready. We're optimistic that another community can pick up right where we left off, rather than starting from scratch like we did. The code for these dashboard products is now available online and free to the next developer.

'''One piece of this project that has unflagging community support is our plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out in particular to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech support such information-sharing?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

[https://github.com/sethwoodworth/SchoolDash Application Source Code]

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T21:42:27Z

209.6.84.160: /* Our work, and our ¡Ahas! */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there’s no reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately! Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Lots of people in Somerville talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To clarify: A typical district has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. However, many districts do not have any easy tools for quickly displaying that information to multiple partners at once or letting them sort the data for patterns.

In Somerville, administrators had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: People had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, the data is only in English, and viewers cannot comment ON the data.

Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

We decided to develop an open source solution for one simple reason: Open source tools can save districts lots of money. With open source, districts don’t have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use; they only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey parent Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera, and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin dashboards provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) complements this with additional student data that was identified by parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other. This view also gives parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment on the data and send these comments to the teacher, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs, covering grades, test scores, attendance, and teacher summary comments.

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

'''Our goal in 2011-12 is to pilot and tweak these three tools with educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We’ll explore the ways these tools can support teamwork among all these people – in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas! and turning points did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display. Otherwise people waste time flipping between file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

Our '''¡Aha! about data dashboards included the following:

In addition to our main ahas, we had several other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards may enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email.

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. '''We’d need to continue this kind of outreach during a pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language.

The prototypes of the administrative and teacher views are complete, and the individual view is nearly complete. We planned to pilot our three “views” in fall, 2011 and report out what we learned. However, the young local technologist who created these great products to community specifications went so slowly on our limited budget that our grant dried up and we weren’t able to pilot them. One classroom’s teacher, families, students, and supporting teachers were ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers, but the developer’s slowness and unreliability prompted a district administrator to pull the plug on the pilot – so the crack in the infrastructure remains.

The lesson here involves the timeline of software development, and the risks associated with community-based design research: The working relationship with the community partner (e.g., the school district) becomes asymmetrical when developing a software application from scratch - lots of work on the developer's end without immediate results for the community partner, potentially leaving them with “cold feet” by the time the product is ready. We're optimistic that another community can pick up right where we left off, rather than starting from scratch like we did. The code for these dashboard products is now available online and free to the next developer.

'''One piece of this project that has unflagging community support is our plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out in particular to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech support such information-sharing?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

[https://github.com/sethwoodworth/SchoolDash Application Source Code]

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T13:32:57Z

209.6.84.160: /* Communication we hoped to improve */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there’s no reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately! Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Lots of people in Somerville talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To clarify: A typical district has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. However, many districts do not have any easy tools for quickly displaying that information to multiple partners at once or letting them sort the data for patterns.

In Somerville, administrators had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: People had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, the data is only in English, and viewers cannot comment ON the data.

Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

We decided to develop an open source solution for one simple reason: Open source tools can save districts lots of money. With open source, districts don’t have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use; they only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey parent Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera, and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin dashboards provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) complements this with additional student data that was identified by parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other. This view also gives parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment on the data and send these comments to the teacher, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs, covering grades, test scores, attendance, and teacher summary comments.

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

'''Our goal in 2011-12 is to pilot and tweak these three tools with educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We’ll explore the ways these tools can support teamwork among all these people – in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display. Otherwise people waste time flipping between file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

Our '''¡Aha! about data dashboards included the following:

In addition to our main ahas, we had several other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards may enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email.

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. '''We’d need to continue this kind of outreach during a pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language.

The prototypes of the administrative and teacher views are complete, and the individual view is nearly complete. We planned to pilot our three “views” in fall, 2011 and report out what we learned. However, the young local technologist who created these great products to community specifications went so slowly on our limited budget that our grant dried up and we weren’t able to pilot them. One classroom’s teacher, families, students, and supporting teachers were ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers, but the developer’s slowness and unreliability prompted a district administrator to pull the plug on the pilot – so the crack in the infrastructure remains.

The lesson here involves the timeline of software development, and the risks associated with community-based design research: The working relationship with the community partner (e.g., the school district) becomes asymmetrical when developing a software application from scratch - lots of work on the developer's end without immediate results for the community partner, potentially leaving them with “cold feet” by the time the product is ready. We're optimistic that another community can pick up right where we left off, rather than starting from scratch like we did. The code for these dashboard products is now available online and free to the next developer.

'''One piece of this project that has unflagging community support is our plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out in particular to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech support such information-sharing?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

[https://github.com/sethwoodworth/SchoolDash Application Source Code]

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T13:31:40Z

209.6.84.160: /* Communication we hoped to improve */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there’s no reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately! Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Lots of people in Somerville talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To clarify: A typical district has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. However, many districts do not have any easy tools for quickly displaying that information to multiple partners at once or letting them sort the data for patterns.

In Somerville, administrators had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: People had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, the data is only in English, and viewers cannot comment ON the data.

Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

We decided to develop an open source solution for one simple reason: Open source tools can save districts lots of money. With open source, districts don’t have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use; they only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey parent Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera, and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin dashboards provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) complements this with additional student data that was identified by parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other. This view also gives parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment on the data and send these comments to the teacher, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs, covering attendance, scores on the MAP and MCAS, and teacher summary comments.

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

'''Our goal in 2011-12 is to pilot and tweak these three tools with educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We’ll explore the ways these tools can support teamwork among all these people – in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display. Otherwise people waste time flipping between file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

Our '''¡Aha! about data dashboards included the following:

In addition to our main ahas, we had several other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards may enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email.

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. '''We’d need to continue this kind of outreach during a pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language.

The prototypes of the administrative and teacher views are complete, and the individual view is nearly complete. We planned to pilot our three “views” in fall, 2011 and report out what we learned. However, the young local technologist who created these great products to community specifications went so slowly on our limited budget that our grant dried up and we weren’t able to pilot them. One classroom’s teacher, families, students, and supporting teachers were ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers, but the developer’s slowness and unreliability prompted a district administrator to pull the plug on the pilot – so the crack in the infrastructure remains.

The lesson here involves the timeline of software development, and the risks associated with community-based design research: The working relationship with the community partner (e.g., the school district) becomes asymmetrical when developing a software application from scratch - lots of work on the developer's end without immediate results for the community partner, potentially leaving them with “cold feet” by the time the product is ready. We're optimistic that another community can pick up right where we left off, rather than starting from scratch like we did. The code for these dashboard products is now available online and free to the next developer.

'''One piece of this project that has unflagging community support is our plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out in particular to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech support such information-sharing?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

[https://github.com/sethwoodworth/SchoolDash Application Source Code]

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T13:22:42Z

209.6.84.160: /* Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there’s no reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately! Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Lots of people in Somerville talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To clarify: A typical district has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. However, many districts do not have any easy tools for quickly displaying that information to multiple partners at once or letting them sort the data for patterns.

In Somerville, administrators had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: People had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, the data is only in English, and viewers cannot comment ON the data.

Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

We decided to develop an open source solution for one simple reason: Open source tools can save districts lots of money. With open source, districts don’t have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use; they only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey parent Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera, and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin dashboards provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) complements this with additional student data that was identified by parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other. This view also gives parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment on the data and send these comments to the teacher, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs:

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

'''Our goal in 2011-12 is to pilot and tweak these three tools with educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We’ll explore the ways these tools can support teamwork among all these people – in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display. Otherwise people waste time flipping between file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

Our '''¡Aha! about data dashboards included the following:

In addition to our main ahas, we had several other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards may enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email.

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. '''We’d need to continue this kind of outreach during a pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language.

The prototypes of the administrative and teacher views are complete, and the individual view is nearly complete. We planned to pilot our three “views” in fall, 2011 and report out what we learned. However, the young local technologist who created these great products to community specifications went so slowly on our limited budget that our grant dried up and we weren’t able to pilot them. One classroom’s teacher, families, students, and supporting teachers were ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers, but the developer’s slowness and unreliability prompted a district administrator to pull the plug on the pilot – so the crack in the infrastructure remains.

The lesson here involves the timeline of software development, and the risks associated with community-based design research: The working relationship with the community partner (e.g., the school district) becomes asymmetrical when developing a software application from scratch - lots of work on the developer's end without immediate results for the community partner, potentially leaving them with “cold feet” by the time the product is ready. We're optimistic that another community can pick up right where we left off, rather than starting from scratch like we did. The code for these dashboard products is now available online and free to the next developer.

'''One piece of this project that has unflagging community support is our plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out in particular to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech support such information-sharing?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

[https://github.com/sethwoodworth/SchoolDash Application Source Code]

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T12:51:45Z

209.6.84.160: /* Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there’s no reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately! Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Lots of people in Somerville talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To clarify: A typical district has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. However, many districts do not have any easy tools for quickly displaying that information to multiple partners at once or letting them sort the data for patterns.

In Somerville, administrators had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: People had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, the data is only in English, and viewers cannot comment ON the data.

Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

We decided to develop an open source solution for one simple reason: Open source tools can save districts lots of money. With open source, districts don’t have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use; they only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey parent Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera, and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin dashboards provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) complements this with additional student data that was identified by parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other. This view also gives parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment on the data and send these comments to the teacher, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs:

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

'''Our goal in 2011-12 is to pilot and tweak these three tools with educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We’ll explore the ways these tools can support teamwork among all these people – in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display. Otherwise people waste time flipping between file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

Our '''¡Aha! about data dashboards included the following:

In addition to our main ahas, we had several other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards may enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email.

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. '''We’d need to continue this kind of outreach during a pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language.

The prototypes of the administrative and teacher views are complete, and the individual view is nearly complete. We planned to pilot our three “views” in fall, 2011 and report out what we learned. However, the young local technologist who created these great products to community specifications went so slowly on our limited budget that our grant dried up and we weren’t able to pilot them. One classroom’s teacher, families, students, and supporting teachers were ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers, but the developer’s slowness and unreliability prompted a district administrator to pull the plug on the pilot – so the crack in the infrastructure remains.

The lesson here involves the timeline of software development, and the risks associated with community-based design research: The working relationship with the community partner (e.g., the school district) becomes asymmetrical when developing a software application from scratch - lots of work on the developer's end without immediate results for the community partner. So, there is a greater chance that the relationship between the developers and the partner will change during the development process, creating a very different environment when the product is ready than when it was first envisioned. We're optimistic that another community can pick up right where we left off, rather than starting from scratch like we did. The code for these dashboard products is now available online and free to the next developer.

'''One piece of this project that has unflagging community support is our plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out in particular to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech support such information-sharing?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

[https://github.com/sethwoodworth/SchoolDash Application Source Code]

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-10-30T06:25:25Z

209.6.84.160: /* Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there’s no reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately! Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Lots of people in Somerville talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To clarify: A typical district has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. However, many districts do not have any easy tools for quickly displaying that information to multiple partners at once or letting them sort the data for patterns.

In Somerville, administrators had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: People had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, the data is only in English, and viewers cannot comment ON the data.

Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

We decided to develop an open source solution for one simple reason: Open source tools can save districts lots of money. With open source, districts don’t have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use; they only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey parent Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera, and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin dashboards provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) complements this with additional student data that was identified by parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other. This view also gives parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment on the data and send these comments to the teacher, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs:

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

'''Our goal in 2011-12 is to pilot and tweak these three tools with educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We’ll explore the ways these tools can support teamwork among all these people – in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display. Otherwise people waste time flipping between file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

Our '''¡Aha! about data dashboards included the following:

In addition to our main ahas, we had several other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards may enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. '''We’ll see if any of this becomes possible!

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. '''We’d need to continue this kind of outreach during a pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language.

The prototypes of the administrative and teacher views are complete, and the individual view is nearly complete. We planned to pilot our three “views” in fall, 2011 and report out what we learned. However, the young local technologist who created these great products to community specifications went so slowly on our limited budget that our grant dried up and we weren’t able to pilot them. One classroom’s teacher, families, students, and supporting teachers were ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers, but the developer’s slowness and unreliability prompted a district administrator to pull the plug on the pilot – so the crack in the infrastructure remains.

The lesson here involves the timeline of software development, and the risks associated with community-based design research: The working relationship with the community partner (e.g., the school district) becomes asymmetrical when developing a software application from scratch - lots of work on the developer's end without immediate results for the community partner. So, there is a greater chance that the relationship between the developers and the partner will change during the development process, creating a very different environment when the product is ready than when it was first envisioned. We're optimistic that another community can pick up right where we left off, rather than starting from scratch like we did. The code for these dashboard products is now available online and free to the next developer.

'''One piece of this project that has unflagging community support is our plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out in particular to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech support such information-sharing?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

[https://github.com/sethwoodworth/SchoolDash Application Source Code]

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Summary: Data dashboards

2011-10-23T05:57:25Z

209.6.84.160:

Click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

===What communication challenges did this project address?===

In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to quickly show parents or teachers basic patterns affecting students – like their absences, test scores, grades, and credits, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, how to read data once they are given it (e.g., a report card), and how to communicate with schools about it. (see http://www.nationalpirc.org/engagement_webinars/webinar-student-data.html)

Gaps in available basic data also can create gaps in student service, because people in charge of supporting a young person remain unaware about some key aspects of their situation (was Jose absent five days last month, or not?)

Over the past two years, local technologists, teachers, and researchers have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help create tools enabling key people to go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) on each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.

The first dashboard below shows data on a school or classroom of students. The dashboard beneath it shows additional data on an individual student to teachers and parents, and allows them to communicate with each other through the “comment boxes.” (Names are fictional to preserve anonymity.)

[[Image:NewAdminDash*.jpg|NewAdminDash*.jpg]]

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

===Why is it important to improve communications?===
What we found:

:*'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

:*'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

:*'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

:*'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===How do the dashboards work? How would they be implemented?===

:*You can see how we designed our dashboards in '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''and '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]]'''. We’ll know how they work for administrators, teachers and parents once we pilot this fall!

===How do you know if your school could improve communication?===
'''Questions to ask about the current system in your school:

:➢ To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢ How does your school make data on student learning visible to school administrators, classroom teachers, and afterschool providers? And how about parents?
:➢ What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people?
:➢ Which conversations about data should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?
:➢ What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?

Click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Summary: Data dashboards

2011-10-23T04:42:33Z

209.6.84.160:

Click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

===What communication challenges did this project address?===

In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to quickly show parents or teachers basic patterns affecting students – like their absences, test scores, grades, and credits, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, how to read data once they are given it (e.g., a report card), and how to communicate with schools about it. (see http://www.nationalpirc.org/engagement_webinars/webinar-student-data.html)

Gaps in available basic data also can create gaps in student service, because people in charge of supporting a young person remain unaware about some key aspects of their situation (was Jose absent five days last month, or not?)

Over the past two years, local technologists, teachers, and researchers have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help create tools enabling key people to go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) on each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.

The first dashboard below shows data on a school or classroom of students. The dashboard beneath it shows additional data on an individual student to teachers and parents, and allows them to communicate with each other through the “comment boxes.” (Names are fictional to preserve anonymity.)

[[Image:NewAdminDash**.jpg|NewAdminDash**.jpg]]

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

===Why is it important to improve communications?===
What we found:

:*'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

:*'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

:*'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

:*'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===How do the dashboards work? How would they be implemented?===

:*You can see how we designed our dashboards in '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''and '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]]'''. We’ll know how they work for administrators, teachers and parents once we pilot this fall!

===How do you know if your school could improve communication?===
'''Questions to ask about the current system in your school:

:➢ To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢ How does your school make data on student learning visible to school administrators, classroom teachers, and afterschool providers? And how about parents?
:➢ What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people?
:➢ Which conversations about data should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?
:➢ What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?

Click here for the '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-10-18T19:47:53Z

209.6.84.160: /* Technological how-tos */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there’s no reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately! Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Lots of people in Somerville talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To clarify: A typical district has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. However, many districts do not have any easy tools for quickly displaying that information to multiple partners at once or letting them sort the data for patterns.

In Somerville, administrators had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: People had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, the data is only in English, and viewers cannot comment ON the data.

Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

We decided to develop an open source solution for one simple reason: Open source tools can save districts lots of money. With open source, districts don’t have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use; they only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey parent Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera, and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin dashboards provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) complements this with additional student data that was identified by parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other. This view also gives parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment on the data and send these comments to the teacher, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs:

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

'''Our goal in 2011-12 is to pilot and tweak these three tools with educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We’ll explore the ways these tools can support teamwork among all these people – in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display. Otherwise people waste time flipping between file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

Our '''¡Aha! about data dashboards included the following:

In addition to our main ahas, we had several other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

'''¡Aha! Data really ''can ''launch a conversation

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

The prototypes of the administrative, teacher, and individual views are nearly complete. '''We plan to pilot our three “views” this fall and will report out what we learn.

We’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards may enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. '''We’ll see if any of this becomes possible!

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. '''We’ll need to continue this kind of outreach during the pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language.

'''We plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech support such information-sharing?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

[https://github.com/sethwoodworth/SchoolDash Application Source Code]

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-10-18T18:50:41Z

209.6.84.160: /* Communication and implementation ¡Aha!s, and turning points! */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there’s no reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately! Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Lots of people in Somerville talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To clarify: A typical district has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. However, many districts do not have any easy tools for quickly displaying that information to multiple partners at once or letting them sort the data for patterns.

In Somerville, administrators had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: People had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, the data is only in English, and viewers cannot comment ON the data.

Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

We decided to develop an open source solution for one simple reason: Open source tools can save districts lots of money. With open source, districts don’t have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use; they only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey parent Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera, and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin dashboards provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) complements this with additional student data that was identified by parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other. This view also gives parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment on the data and send these comments to the teacher, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs:

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

'''Our goal in 2011-12 is to pilot and tweak these three tools with educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We’ll explore the ways these tools can support teamwork among all these people – in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display. Otherwise people waste time flipping between file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

Our '''¡Aha! about data dashboards included the following:

In addition to our main ahas, we had several other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

'''¡Aha! Data really ''can ''launch a conversation

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

The prototypes of the administrative, teacher, and individual views are nearly complete. '''We plan to pilot our three “views” this fall and will report out what we learn.

We’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards may enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. '''We’ll see if any of this becomes possible!

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. '''We’ll need to continue this kind of outreach during the pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language.

'''We plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech support such information-sharing?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2011-10-18T18:50:26Z

209.6.84.160: /* Our work, and our ¡Ahas! */

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, Josh Wairi, and Seth Woodworth for the dashboard project.

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In an era when you can log on to any computer and get quick updates from friends, there’s no reason why all the people who need to know basic info in order to serve young people can’t know it immediately! Quantitative measures or summary data about young people (e.g., a report card) never show "the whole child" (eportfolios can help with that!), but they still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress, and they do tend to predict important events like “dropping out.”

Unfortunately, access to the data systems needed to provide this info varies widely among districts. Those that can afford it are increasingly investing in sophisticated data systems. Lower income districts can’t afford to. And when districts do have online data display tools, called “data dashboards,” they typically aren't designed by educators or parents.

We - local technologists, teachers, and researchers - have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view lots of student data in one place. The result of our work is a suite of three “data dashboards” - open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers in communication about student data to support each student’s success.

Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. Guided by a collaborative design process that drew on representatives of all the community stakeholders above, Somerville technologists Seth Woodworth and Evan Burchard created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher (and author) Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

We felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design open-source educational tools that link the partners in young people’s education in regular communication about their learning. Here are the main reasons:

'''A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

Principals Vadhera and DeFalco, teacher Josh Wairi, and various students we talked to in our other pilots all mentioned instances where a student “fell through the cracks” because of a piece of missing data -- for example, a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade at the end of the semester, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. These main partners also described how seeing new patterns, and faster, could support timely interventions -- from MCAS accommodations to targeted academic support.

'''One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display.

Lots of people in Somerville talked about the need to improve data display for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To clarify: A typical district has a “student information system” - a database that stores or “warehouses” student information. However, many districts do not have any easy tools for quickly displaying that information to multiple partners at once or letting them sort the data for patterns.

In Somerville, administrators had to send data analysis requests to a central office (filled with great staff!) and the staff would send patterns back to them. Or, teachers had to create their own Excel spreadsheets or printouts and analyze them by hand. The data was inaccessible for other reasons, too: People had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data, the data is only in English, and viewers cannot comment ON the data.

Administrators also told us of time wasted in meetings as staff flipped through multiple folders or drawers to find data; further, staff wasted lots of time preparing for meetings by trying hand-analyze patterns across such data sources.

'''Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

We decided to develop an open source solution for one simple reason: Open source tools can save districts lots of money. With open source, districts don’t have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use; they only have to pay for services (upkeep and troubleshooting the tool), which can be a fraction of the cost. Our technologist Seth put it this way: “Take the quarterly profit of a company like Blackboard INC (Quarter 1, 2010) and break it down into services and license fees. In just one quarter, Blackboard made only $7.3 million in services [tech support], but made $93.7 million dollars in 'product revenues' (licenses to run their software). In the K-12 context, a freely available and documented open source competitor to store-bought communication tools would free up a lot of money back to US schools.”

Based on a model created in Excel by Healey parent Greg Nadeau, and designed in partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera, and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, the admin dashboards provide quick views for teams of teachers and administrators to compare students in a group and discern patterns. All data fields are visible on one screen, so there is no need to click through multiple windows to view the desired data. Viewers can sort up to three columns at a time simply by clicking at the top of each while holding down the shift key. Whereas the admin view lists all students in the school, the teacher view presents similar information for a single class of students. Here is the admin view, with fictional data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:NewAdminDash.jpg|NewAdminDash.jpg]]

Our individual view (below) complements this with additional student data that was identified by parents, students, afterschool providers, and teachers as being especially relevant to their communications with each other. This view also gives parent and afterschool provider viewers the chance to comment on the data and send these comments to the teacher, sparking an exchange that can continue over email or in person. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments:

[[Image:NewComments.jpg|NewComments.jpg]]

Note the tabs for viewing other pages at the top of the screenshot. The images below show the pages connected to each of these tabs:

[[Image:IndivDashSummary.jpg|IndivDashSummary.jpg]]

[[Image:Test scores.jpg|Test scores.jpg]]

[[Image:Attendance.jpg|Attendance.jpg]]

[[Image:Teacher comments.jpg|Teacher comments.jpg]]

In creating the individual view, we drew on a data display model from the New Visions schools in New York (http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/9thGradeTracker.pdf)
combined it with Somerville’s locally designed K-6 report card, and worked with teacher Josh Wairi and his families (with advice from his students and afterschool providers) to integrate everyone’s insights into the testable product.

'''Our goal in 2011-12 is to pilot and tweak these three tools with educators, administrators, families, students, and afterschool providers. We’ll explore the ways these tools can support teamwork among all these people – in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?

'''Our main ¡Ahas! over time have been these:

'''¡Aha! A gap in student data equals a gap in service.

'''¡Aha! The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It is crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display. Otherwise people waste time flipping between file folders, spreadsheets, or drawers.

'''¡Aha! Open source data tools could save schools across the country significant costs, if tech support for open source tools were available locally.

===Communication and implementation ¡Aha!s, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Expanded story: Data dashboards|here!]]'''

Our '''¡Aha! about data dashboards included the following:

In addition to our main ahas, we had several other key discoveries along the way:

'''¡Aha! In addition to having the ability to quickly see and sort such basic data, diverse partners in young people’s lives need supports to communicate ABOUT basic data.

'''¡Aha! Many parents welcome an invitation into a conversation with their child’s teachers, and even if these parents are unfamiliar with technology, these parents often see technology as an opportunity for connection, rather than an obstacle.

'''¡Aha! Data really ''can ''launch a conversation

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

The prototypes of the administrative, teacher, and individual views are nearly complete. '''We plan to pilot our three “views” this fall and will report out what we learn.

We’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about the dashboards’ potential value. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, "Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards may enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. '''We’ll see if any of this becomes possible!

'''The families whose children most need assistance are often the hardest to reach with technology, but they are also the most in need of such rapid access to information. '''We’ll need to continue this kind of outreach during the pilot phase, because we face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language.

'''We plan to work this year with the Healey PTA to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents for other parents who need this support. '''We’ve already established a computer in the PTA room, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and we’re reaching out to other computing facilities in the school and community organizations. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:
:➢Can everyone who needs to get and share important progress information, get and share it when they need to?
:➢If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?
:➢Is your district spending tons of money on data display tools to get basic data in front of people?
:➢ If so, how could low cost tech support such information-sharing?
:➢To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known?
:➢What infrastructure would support actual conversations ABOUT "data," between the people who share young people? Which conversations should happen in person and which could be supported online? Could you do an experiment where you live to test which works for what?

===Technological how-tos===
''Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support

2011-10-17T01:26:08Z

209.6.84.160: /* Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points! */

[[Image:Juneresearchday.jpg|thumb|Teachers and students analyzing texting in June 2011]]

''Written by Mica Pollock, Uche Amaechi, Maureen Robichaux, and Ted O'Brien for the texting project, with input from students at Full Circle/Next Wave

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In the texting pilot, we all set forth to learn how texting might enable supporters in each young person’s life to communicate rapidly with the young person -- both about how he/she is doing personally and academically and about actions that might enable his/her success.

[[Image:Textingresearchday.jpeg|thumb|Students and teachers analyzing (anonymized) examples of student-teacher texts: Research Day at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, April 2011]]

Of the various technologies in our lives, it is cell phones that are with us all day, and keep us most connected and available. Texting (often called “SMS”) and other mobile text based communications (like instant messaging) give people particular control over when and where they communicate. In theory, people can review and respond to texts at their leisure--in the evening from home, or over the weekend after sports practice. But a text is particularly hard to ignore, and responses to texts often arrive in seconds -- which is why in summer 2010, Somerville students told us to try texting for rapid youth support (see the full story [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here.]].

They were on to something: texting has been shown to be a particularly used channel for youth communication today. According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study on teenage use of mobile phones, teen use of texting has increased dramatically since 2006 (Campbell et al, 2010). Between 2006 and 2010, the percentage of all teens that used text messaging doubled from 27% to 54%. The only other communication medium that increased during those dates showed more muted gains: cell phone calls increased from 34-38% and the use of social networking sites increased from 21-25%. While calls remained a “critically important function” for teens, especially when communicating with parents, teens were clearly taking to texting in a much more dramatic way than any other communication medium. By 2009, the use of texting had increased among young people between the ages of 12 and 17: on average, older teens were even more likely to text than younger ones (Campbell et al, 2010). Furthermore, the Pew Polls have found that 70% of teens use texting to do "things related to school work," and a smaller but more dedicated 23% of teens use texting for school at least daily. Texting seems to be used more for general school-related communications than for detailed discussions of assignments and homework: 30% of all students and 45% of poor students specifically report never texting about school assignments (Campbell et al, 2010).

In its small character capacity, texting may not be an obvious choice for discussions of the details of homework. But by providing a channel for anytime sharing of basic information and typically informal, individualized information about life and school experiences, we thought texting might be able to support the sort of ongoing personalized attention we know is necessary for supporting young people in schools.

Still, do a Google search for student-teacher texting and most of what you will find is fear: districts considering bans on texting or teachers quietly posting updates about their own personal experiences with trying it. Many view texting as an inappropriate mode of communication between teachers and students, for several main reasons. Even more a year ago than now, texting feels like a “youth”-owned medium. Also, because texting really feels like a private “tube” between two people, the sort of support texting can offer immediately seems particularly personal. That privacy is exactly what scares some people about misuse: teachers and students somehow seem more “alone together” while texting (even though private classroom conversations after school are equally “alone”). Texting also extends the boundaries of potential communication with students outside the school day and into teachers’ own afterschool lives.

Instead of just fearing texting, we decided to learn together what it could offer public school communities. So, we – teachers, researchers, and students -- rolled out a texting pilot with 40 students across multiple classrooms. As we describe in more detail [Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|[here,]] some teachers in Somerville weren’t ready to try texting for reaching their students; these students and teachers were. They really were pioneers in testing how a communication tool already in the hands of most young people in the building could be pulled in for everyday student support.

In some ways, our site -- Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative school -- is a special school: all teachers work in what our participating high school teacher Ted called “teacher-counselor mode” and expect personal support relationships as part of their job. Each teacher has a co-counseling group that meets twice a week, where he/she gets to know more about young people’s personal struggles. Teachers work in a “triangle” with clinicians and students’ other counselors. But really, teachers at FC/NW are simply encouraged by their school to build teacher-student support relationships, something every teacher has to do but may not have the time or the administrative support to do.

So far, we have been testing one-to-one (private) texting between teachers and students, and secondarily, between students and eight graduate student mentors from the Harvard Graduate School of Education who helped us connect to the students to check in. We’re using Google Voice, a free service that records all of the texts in teachers’ inboxes. This allowed two researchers in the group (Uche and Mica) to review the texts along with teachers to see if they were helpful -- with students’ advance, overall permission. (GoogleVoice also gives teachers a separate phone number, so they’re not using their personal phone.)

Since starting, we’ve seen student-teacher texting after and before school take off successfully with middle and high school youth. In the fall, we plan to test ways to enable youth and a "team" of their chosen supporters (including afterschool providers, peers, and family members) to communicate about any topic via group texting.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?
-------

[[Image:textingteachersteam.jpg|thumb|Mo and Ted, texting teacher pioneers, with Uche and Mica. . .and donuts]]

Design based research is usually about proceeding in very clear “stages” to test something. As stated earlier, we wanted to test rapid support communications among a “team” of youths’ chosen supporters. We began with testing a school-based online social network and eventually moved toward testing one-to-one texting instead, with the vision of testing out “team” texting next.

So, our work proceeded in stages and also in a rolling manner over two years, based on ongoing reactions to students’ and teachers’ insights and interests re. support communications that might assist youth.

Throughout, we kept our core questions constant. Who needs to share which information with whom, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome? And, we came to ask: how might texting enable (or not enable) the rapid exchanges of information and caring often so needed to support young people?

Note: Unlike in our ePortfolio pilot, where the goal was to create ePortfolios that would succeed and stick at Somerville High School, we decided in this case not to “make sure texting works, by doing whatever is necessary to make it work.” Instead, we wanted to explore how teachers and students would use (or NOT use) texting in youth support, if they were just explicitly invited to text for school-related communication. We also wanted to know if some type or series of communications could help make a young person more connected to school or more successful academically.

So, in a nutshell, we offered the channel and waited to see what everyone would do with it. We didn’t push any particular use of the texting, but instead kept talking about actual uses. Mo, Ted, and the students became a research team with Uche, Mica, and the HGSE students, together exploring the use of texting in rapid youth support. We put our Ford support resources into stipending teachers $25/hr (2 hrs/week) for their extra time piloting the tool and analyzing data, paying kids back with food and $25/each for a formal “research day,” and supporting Uche to coordinate the pilot. For course credit, HGSE students checked in on the students and acted as anytime mentors for young people who wanted to share questions or thoughts via texts. We also agreed to line up tutors or mentors for anyone who wanted one and did for several students—though as we mention in the [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!||full story]], logistics and low interests later fizzled that plan.

We held regular conversations with students and teachers to analyze how the texting was going for them. Eight HGSE students informally interviewed the FC/NW students a few times a month, over donuts at the school. Uche and Mica talked with Ted and Mo, Uche texted regularly with Ted and Mo himself, and Mica took a “team” of students on as a texting partner. Everyone was invited to analyze the texting conversations together in two research events, the first held at Harvard and the second held at the FC/NW building.

Our main '''¡Ahas!''' over time have been these:

'''MAIN ¡Aha!: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.

'''MAIN ¡Aha!: Texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate. People can use regular phones, smart phones, and computers to communicate via text message.

'''¡Aha! Go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.

'''Most of the actual texts that prove these points can be found [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here,]] but we wanted to tempt you by showing you a few more examples of what supportive teacher-student texting can look like:

:Teacher: [Student,] do you still have the math book I gave you for homework? If you do let me know and [teacher] too 2:38 PM

:Student: Ya I do 2:59 PM

:Teacher: Use it! 3:27 PM

:Student: Ok. I will 3:31 PM

:Student: I just left my house right now so I'm going to b late 7:47 AM

:Teacher: And I need to know this? 7:48 AM

:Teacher: Hurry up! 7:49 AM

:Student: Because I don't want you to worry 7:49 AM

:Teacher: You miss school regularly silly goose 7:51 AM

:Student: I came in all this week and collected points 7:54 AM

:Teacher: Get here, we can celebrate 7:55 AM

:Student: Hahaha okk I'm on cross street now 7:58 AM

:Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

:Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

:Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

:Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

''' Want to see more texts? Click [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here!]]

In discussions throughout the year and in several focused data analysis meetings, student and teacher participants argued that texting had two key benefits: individualized, timely student support and the ability to strengthen student-teacher relationships. Students argued that supportive texts from teachers were giving them the motivation or information necessary to come to school on time, complete homework, remain aware of requirements, and participate in afterschool activities. Over the semester, we also saw texting teachers and students having more frequent, and deepening, conversations about school commitments and life struggles, both via text and then in person. In reviewing texts between students and university mentors, we have seen that afterschool supporters can also use texting to build stronger relationships with students and to communicate regularly about careers, jobs, and school persistence.

In sum: most school districts are out to regulate and restrict texting and fear student-teacher texting as somehow inappropriate. We’ve seen that texting can simply extend relationship-building and student support outside of school hours. But this raises several overall questions for public schools. One: adults’ time. If gluing a relationship together outside of the school day helps young people do better in school, is it “worth” teachers’ time? Two: Where do the school walls end? If a teacher supports young people’s school success through wakeup texts or afterschool reminders, is this an appropriate reach into the home or out of the classroom? Three: appropriate student-teacher relationships. If good teaching requires real relationships between students and teachers – a form of friendship with role boundaries-- how can they communicate via today’s most “friendly” media but still within age- and role-appropriate bounds of partnership? It may be that we need to redefine “appropriate” student-teacher relationships in the digital age. As Shelia, age 17, put it in this pilot, texting definitely put students and teachers more “on the same level.” Texting was definitely a “youth medium” when we started, but it may not be for long!

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Ahas! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, click [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here!]]''''''

Our ¡Ahas! about texting included the following.

'''¡Aha! Texting works when you can’t reach young people any other way for time-sensitive information.

'''¡Aha! Texting helps when students don’t have home phones or literally aren’t in school.

'''¡Aha! Texting can support communication about a wide variety of school issues.

'''¡Aha! We began to see that students and teachers can build personal relationships via text.

'''¡Aha! Fundamental academic support, personal support, and light banter can occur in the same conversation.

'''¡Aha! Texting can build a relationship for school even if you are not talking about school.

'''¡Aha! Texting didn’t supplant face to face conversation. Often, the text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation.

'''¡Aha! As relationships grow, they are documented in texts!

'''¡Aha! Normalizing texting as something students and teachers can do makes it easier to strike up a relationship with a young person.

'''¡Aha! The style of texts can put students and teachers “on the same level.”

'''¡Aha! The many emotions possible via text can give students and teachers a range of ways to share their feelings.

'''¡Aha! Concerns about students being “inappropriate” with the channel may be overblown.

'''¡Aha! Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring because they demonstrated effort by both students and teachers to respond to the other.

'''¡Aha! Texting’s time commitment shows caring and builds relationship. But it also -- takes time!

'''¡Aha! Of course, if your support network uses your phone to reach you, you need a phone.

'''¡Aha! In our brief test of texting between HGSE students and the FC/NW students, we began to see that texting can support ongoing career mentoring, too.

'''¡Aha! Finally, face to face mentoring meetings can be really hard to schedule, making texting even more sensible.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We have successfully supported a pilot of student-teacher texting at Full Circle/Next Wave and have dozens of students and four new teachers excited about continuing. The principal is interested in expanding use of texting to include other current and former teachers within the school. While many teachers still didn’t know how to use a cell phone, some are newly starting to text. We joked that maybe the principal himself would start using our texting “blast” to message his entire staff!

Both students and teachers say that we’ve all demonstrated that texting is a possible tool for communication with young people that mixes personal support, academic support, and everyday banter. We have realized so far that texting is a very natural and important channel not only for check-ins and updates not possible during the school day, but for a key, perhaps ultimate support: building a relationship between student and teacher or adult mentor.

At our April Research Day at Harvard, Obens, one of the students, summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year: “it shows connection. It’s really helpful --- it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on this schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Later in the school year, Obens would point out that texting helped him focus overall on school, but couldn’t keep him focused during class – that was his next frontier for self-improvement. Many students also made clear that while improving student-teacher communication was key, linking in other people in their lives was crucial too. As Mica wrote to herself in February after a group conversation that followed texts with several individual girls, “note: several times in this conversation I felt the need to tell others in the school, things that I was texting about w/ an individual kid, so that others could be pulled in for the collective support.”

So, our next step is to see how texting works with new student and teacher users and also, to test texting “teams.” In fall 2011, we’ll continue teacher-student texting with additional teachers and youth, start teacher-full class texting, and test group texting between chosen “teams” of supporters around individual youth. We’ll see how and if multiple supporters take the opportunity for rapid communications about students’ personal needs.

As we test group texting among “teams” of students’ chosen supporters this fall, we’re going with youth-constructed teams of supporters and we’ll see where they take a group texting tool. We have lots of questions. Is the private and personal nature of communication via one-to-one text a key to its use for rapid student support? If so, can a group text together for youth support, or not? Throughout the pilot, one-to-one texting continued to feel particularly private -- which was, perhaps, why so much relationship-building was possible over it. So, can a “team” use texting to communicate rapidly about student support, or will the “group” communication make texting less desirable? Which communications should be private, which public to a “team”? And who should be in a texting “team”? As one student said, she was now up for texting teachers but not for having her mom aware of her school related “business.” As Ted put it, to “honor the kids’ sense of privacy,” “which communications should go to parents? Which to kids? which to both?”

This will remain our core inquiry in Phase 2 as we move forward to test “team” texting.

Again, we’ll offer youth and “team” the channel and learn together what they do with it!

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:

:-In your school, when students have personal questions or needs, are there ways for them to rapidly reach their supporters?
:-How do teachers supplement their often-limited interactions with students during the school day?
:-How much do teachers communicate with students and families outside of the classroom?
:-What type of relationships and interactions do teachers have with their students, both in and outside of the classroom?
:-What policies, structures, and norms do teachers and students have for interacting outside of class?
:-Could texting help with rapid youth support? What are your reservations about texting, and how might these be addressed?

===Technological how-tos===

Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

'''Setting up Google Voice (screen shots, etc.!) Guidance on this coming soon from Uche!

Google Voice is a free web based phone and text messaging service provided by Google. Google Voice provides a separate phone number that teachers can give out to students. The use of a separate number helps preserve the privacy of teachers’ personal phone numbers. This separate number, coupled with some of the service’s advanced features, such as number blocking, provide the teacher with an added sense of privacy and security. Finally, we chose the Google Voice service because it allowed multiple people—teacher and researchers—access to the same account, providing a general transparency and accountability and allowing Uche and Mica as co-researchers to review the teachers’ text communications by agreement. Beyond the research, the teachers also found it useful to be able to review their own texting exchanges.

With Google Voice, teachers can view and send texts from a computer without texting charges. Teachers can also take advantage of a computer’s larger screen and familiar interface to view texts arranged by student or time, and easily search through their history of texts. Teachers can check received messages on their smart phones via specially designed apps, or they can choose to have the service forward any texts to their feature phones’ regular text messaging accounts. (A feature phone is a cell phone that does not have installable apps from an app store.)

The simplest add on to Google Voice so far was to create a one to many “blast” that the teachers could use to message their entire class. Seth, our developer, connected the teachers’ Google Voice accounts to group texting software made with the Twilio API, to afford teacher-whole class messaging. The setup created a proxy phone number for a new “group” of all of the teacher’s students. The teacher only had to send a message to that number and the associated students would all receive the message. (With regular Google Voice, you can only text 5 people at a time). However, because of the difficulty in maintaining and updating the custom designed software, we will be trying out commercial software such as GroupMe or Beluga for group and whole-class texting going forward. These application/services, like Google Voice, can operate through an app on a smart phone, or by forwarding messages to phone numbers on feature phones.

Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support

2011-10-17T01:18:19Z

209.6.84.160: /* Our work, and our ¡Ahas! */

[[Image:Juneresearchday.jpg|thumb|Teachers and students analyzing texting in June 2011]]

''Written by Mica Pollock, Uche Amaechi, Maureen Robichaux, and Ted O'Brien for the texting project, with input from students at Full Circle/Next Wave

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In the texting pilot, we all set forth to learn how texting might enable supporters in each young person’s life to communicate rapidly with the young person -- both about how he/she is doing personally and academically and about actions that might enable his/her success.

[[Image:Textingresearchday.jpeg|thumb|Students and teachers analyzing (anonymized) examples of student-teacher texts: Research Day at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, April 2011]]

Of the various technologies in our lives, it is cell phones that are with us all day, and keep us most connected and available. Texting (often called “SMS”) and other mobile text based communications (like instant messaging) give people particular control over when and where they communicate. In theory, people can review and respond to texts at their leisure--in the evening from home, or over the weekend after sports practice. But a text is particularly hard to ignore, and responses to texts often arrive in seconds -- which is why in summer 2010, Somerville students told us to try texting for rapid youth support (see the full story [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here.]].

They were on to something: texting has been shown to be a particularly used channel for youth communication today. According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study on teenage use of mobile phones, teen use of texting has increased dramatically since 2006 (Campbell et al, 2010). Between 2006 and 2010, the percentage of all teens that used text messaging doubled from 27% to 54%. The only other communication medium that increased during those dates showed more muted gains: cell phone calls increased from 34-38% and the use of social networking sites increased from 21-25%. While calls remained a “critically important function” for teens, especially when communicating with parents, teens were clearly taking to texting in a much more dramatic way than any other communication medium. By 2009, the use of texting had increased among young people between the ages of 12 and 17: on average, older teens were even more likely to text than younger ones (Campbell et al, 2010). Furthermore, the Pew Polls have found that 70% of teens use texting to do "things related to school work," and a smaller but more dedicated 23% of teens use texting for school at least daily. Texting seems to be used more for general school-related communications than for detailed discussions of assignments and homework: 30% of all students and 45% of poor students specifically report never texting about school assignments (Campbell et al, 2010).

In its small character capacity, texting may not be an obvious choice for discussions of the details of homework. But by providing a channel for anytime sharing of basic information and typically informal, individualized information about life and school experiences, we thought texting might be able to support the sort of ongoing personalized attention we know is necessary for supporting young people in schools.

Still, do a Google search for student-teacher texting and most of what you will find is fear: districts considering bans on texting or teachers quietly posting updates about their own personal experiences with trying it. Many view texting as an inappropriate mode of communication between teachers and students, for several main reasons. Even more a year ago than now, texting feels like a “youth”-owned medium. Also, because texting really feels like a private “tube” between two people, the sort of support texting can offer immediately seems particularly personal. That privacy is exactly what scares some people about misuse: teachers and students somehow seem more “alone together” while texting (even though private classroom conversations after school are equally “alone”). Texting also extends the boundaries of potential communication with students outside the school day and into teachers’ own afterschool lives.

Instead of just fearing texting, we decided to learn together what it could offer public school communities. So, we – teachers, researchers, and students -- rolled out a texting pilot with 40 students across multiple classrooms. As we describe in more detail [Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|[here,]] some teachers in Somerville weren’t ready to try texting for reaching their students; these students and teachers were. They really were pioneers in testing how a communication tool already in the hands of most young people in the building could be pulled in for everyday student support.

In some ways, our site -- Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative school -- is a special school: all teachers work in what our participating high school teacher Ted called “teacher-counselor mode” and expect personal support relationships as part of their job. Each teacher has a co-counseling group that meets twice a week, where he/she gets to know more about young people’s personal struggles. Teachers work in a “triangle” with clinicians and students’ other counselors. But really, teachers at FC/NW are simply encouraged by their school to build teacher-student support relationships, something every teacher has to do but may not have the time or the administrative support to do.

So far, we have been testing one-to-one (private) texting between teachers and students, and secondarily, between students and eight graduate student mentors from the Harvard Graduate School of Education who helped us connect to the students to check in. We’re using Google Voice, a free service that records all of the texts in teachers’ inboxes. This allowed two researchers in the group (Uche and Mica) to review the texts along with teachers to see if they were helpful -- with students’ advance, overall permission. (GoogleVoice also gives teachers a separate phone number, so they’re not using their personal phone.)

Since starting, we’ve seen student-teacher texting after and before school take off successfully with middle and high school youth. In the fall, we plan to test ways to enable youth and a "team" of their chosen supporters (including afterschool providers, peers, and family members) to communicate about any topic via group texting.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?
-------

[[Image:textingteachersteam.jpg|thumb|Mo and Ted, texting teacher pioneers, with Uche and Mica. . .and donuts]]

Design based research is usually about proceeding in very clear “stages” to test something. As stated earlier, we wanted to test rapid support communications among a “team” of youths’ chosen supporters. We began with testing a school-based online social network and eventually moved toward testing one-to-one texting instead, with the vision of testing out “team” texting next.

So, our work proceeded in stages and also in a rolling manner over two years, based on ongoing reactions to students’ and teachers’ insights and interests re. support communications that might assist youth.

Throughout, we kept our core questions constant. Who needs to share which information with whom, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome? And, we came to ask: how might texting enable (or not enable) the rapid exchanges of information and caring often so needed to support young people?

Note: Unlike in our ePortfolio pilot, where the goal was to create ePortfolios that would succeed and stick at Somerville High School, we decided in this case not to “make sure texting works, by doing whatever is necessary to make it work.” Instead, we wanted to explore how teachers and students would use (or NOT use) texting in youth support, if they were just explicitly invited to text for school-related communication. We also wanted to know if some type or series of communications could help make a young person more connected to school or more successful academically.

So, in a nutshell, we offered the channel and waited to see what everyone would do with it. We didn’t push any particular use of the texting, but instead kept talking about actual uses. Mo, Ted, and the students became a research team with Uche, Mica, and the HGSE students, together exploring the use of texting in rapid youth support. We put our Ford support resources into stipending teachers $25/hr (2 hrs/week) for their extra time piloting the tool and analyzing data, paying kids back with food and $25/each for a formal “research day,” and supporting Uche to coordinate the pilot. For course credit, HGSE students checked in on the students and acted as anytime mentors for young people who wanted to share questions or thoughts via texts. We also agreed to line up tutors or mentors for anyone who wanted one and did for several students—though as we mention in the [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!||full story]], logistics and low interests later fizzled that plan.

We held regular conversations with students and teachers to analyze how the texting was going for them. Eight HGSE students informally interviewed the FC/NW students a few times a month, over donuts at the school. Uche and Mica talked with Ted and Mo, Uche texted regularly with Ted and Mo himself, and Mica took a “team” of students on as a texting partner. Everyone was invited to analyze the texting conversations together in two research events, the first held at Harvard and the second held at the FC/NW building.

Our main '''¡Ahas!''' over time have been these:

'''MAIN ¡Aha!: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.

'''MAIN ¡Aha!: Texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate. People can use regular phones, smart phones, and computers to communicate via text message.

'''¡Aha! Go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.

'''Most of the actual texts that prove these points can be found [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here,]] but we wanted to tempt you by showing you a few more examples of what supportive teacher-student texting can look like:

:Teacher: [Student,] do you still have the math book I gave you for homework? If you do let me know and [teacher] too 2:38 PM

:Student: Ya I do 2:59 PM

:Teacher: Use it! 3:27 PM

:Student: Ok. I will 3:31 PM

:Student: I just left my house right now so I'm going to b late 7:47 AM

:Teacher: And I need to know this? 7:48 AM

:Teacher: Hurry up! 7:49 AM

:Student: Because I don't want you to worry 7:49 AM

:Teacher: You miss school regularly silly goose 7:51 AM

:Student: I came in all this week and collected points 7:54 AM

:Teacher: Get here, we can celebrate 7:55 AM

:Student: Hahaha okk I'm on cross street now 7:58 AM

:Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

:Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

:Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

:Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

''' Want to see more texts? Click [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here!]]

In discussions throughout the year and in several focused data analysis meetings, student and teacher participants argued that texting had two key benefits: individualized, timely student support and the ability to strengthen student-teacher relationships. Students argued that supportive texts from teachers were giving them the motivation or information necessary to come to school on time, complete homework, remain aware of requirements, and participate in afterschool activities. Over the semester, we also saw texting teachers and students having more frequent, and deepening, conversations about school commitments and life struggles, both via text and then in person. In reviewing texts between students and university mentors, we have seen that afterschool supporters can also use texting to build stronger relationships with students and to communicate regularly about careers, jobs, and school persistence.

In sum: most school districts are out to regulate and restrict texting and fear student-teacher texting as somehow inappropriate. We’ve seen that texting can simply extend relationship-building and student support outside of school hours. But this raises several overall questions for public schools. One: adults’ time. If gluing a relationship together outside of the school day helps young people do better in school, is it “worth” teachers’ time? Two: Where do the school walls end? If a teacher supports young people’s school success through wakeup texts or afterschool reminders, is this an appropriate reach into the home or out of the classroom? Three: appropriate student-teacher relationships. If good teaching requires real relationships between students and teachers – a form of friendship with role boundaries-- how can they communicate via today’s most “friendly” media but still within age- and role-appropriate bounds of partnership? It may be that we need to redefine “appropriate” student-teacher relationships in the digital age. As Shelia, age 17, put it in this pilot, texting definitely put students and teachers more “on the same level.” Texting was definitely a “youth medium” when we started, but it may not be for long!

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Ahas! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ahas, click [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here!]]''''''

Our ¡Ahas! about texting included the following.

'''¡Aha! Texting works when you can’t reach young people any other way for time-sensitive information.

'''¡Aha! Texting helps when students don’t have home phones or literally aren’t in school.

'''¡Aha! Texting can support communication about a wide variety of school issues.

'''¡Aha! We began to see that students and teachers can build personal relationships via text.

'''¡Aha! Fundamental academic support, personal support, and light banter can occur in the same conversation.

'''¡Aha! Texting can build a relationship for school even if you are not talking about school.

'''¡Aha! Texting didn’t supplant face to face conversation. Often, the text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation.

'''¡Aha! As relationships grow, they are documented in texts!

'''¡Aha! Normalizing texting as something students and teachers can do makes it easier to strike up a relationship with a young person.

'''¡Aha! The style of texts can put students and teachers “on the same level.”

'''¡Aha! The many emotions possible via text can give students and teachers a range of ways to share their feelings.

'''¡Aha! Concerns about students being “inappropriate” with the channel may be overblown.

'''¡Aha! Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring because they demonstrated effort by both students and teachers to respond to the other.

'''¡Aha! Texting’s time commitment shows caring and builds relationship. But it also -- takes time!

'''¡Aha! Of course, if your support network uses your phone to reach you, you need a phone.

'''¡Aha! In our brief test of texting between HGSE students and the FC/NW students, we began to see that texting can support ongoing career mentoring, too.

'''¡Aha! Finally, face to face mentoring meetings can be really hard to schedule, making texting even more sensible.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We have successfully supported a pilot of student-teacher texting at Full Circle/Next Wave and have dozens of students and four new teachers excited about continuing. The principal is interested in expanding use of texting to include other current and former teachers within the school. While many teachers still didn’t know how to use a cell phone, some are newly starting to text. We joked that maybe the principal himself would start using our texting “blast” to message his entire staff!

Both students and teachers say that we’ve all demonstrated that texting is a possible tool for communication with young people that mixes personal support, academic support, and everyday banter. We have realized so far that texting is a very natural and important channel not only for check-ins and updates not possible during the school day, but for a key, perhaps ultimate support: building a relationship between student and teacher or adult mentor.

At our April Research Day at Harvard, Obens, one of the students, summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year: “it shows connection. It’s really helpful --- it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on this schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Later in the school year, Obens would point out that texting helped him focus overall on school, but couldn’t keep him focused during class – that was his next frontier for self-improvement. Many students also made clear that while improving student-teacher communication was key, linking in other people in their lives was crucial too. As Mica wrote to herself in February after a group conversation that followed texts with several individual girls, “note: several times in this conversation I felt the need to tell others in the school, things that I was texting about w/ an individual kid, so that others could be pulled in for the collective support.”

So, our next step is to see how texting works with new student and teacher users and also, to test texting “teams.” In fall 2011, we’ll continue teacher-student texting with additional teachers and youth, start teacher-full class texting, and test group texting between chosen “teams” of supporters around individual youth. We’ll see how and if multiple supporters take the opportunity for rapid communications about students’ personal needs.

As we test group texting among “teams” of students’ chosen supporters this fall, we’re going with youth-constructed teams of supporters and we’ll see where they take a group texting tool. We have lots of questions. Is the private and personal nature of communication via one-to-one text a key to its use for rapid student support? If so, can a group text together for youth support, or not? Throughout the pilot, one-to-one texting continued to feel particularly private -- which was, perhaps, why so much relationship-building was possible over it. So, can a “team” use texting to communicate rapidly about student support, or will the “group” communication make texting less desirable? Which communications should be private, which public to a “team”? And who should be in a texting “team”? As one student said, she was now up for texting teachers but not for having her mom aware of her school related “business.” As Ted put it, to “honor the kids’ sense of privacy,” “which communications should go to parents? Which to kids? which to both?”

This will remain our core inquiry in Phase 2 as we move forward to test “team” texting.

Again, we’ll offer youth and “team” the channel and learn together what they do with it!

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:

:-In your school, when students have personal questions or needs, are there ways for them to rapidly reach their supporters?
:-How do teachers supplement their often-limited interactions with students during the school day?
:-How much do teachers communicate with students and families outside of the classroom?
:-What type of relationships and interactions do teachers have with their students, both in and outside of the classroom?
:-What policies, structures, and norms do teachers and students have for interacting outside of class?
:-Could texting help with rapid youth support? What are your reservations about texting, and how might these be addressed?

===Technological how-tos===

Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

'''Setting up Google Voice (screen shots, etc.!) Guidance on this coming soon from Uche!

Google Voice is a free web based phone and text messaging service provided by Google. Google Voice provides a separate phone number that teachers can give out to students. The use of a separate number helps preserve the privacy of teachers’ personal phone numbers. This separate number, coupled with some of the service’s advanced features, such as number blocking, provide the teacher with an added sense of privacy and security. Finally, we chose the Google Voice service because it allowed multiple people—teacher and researchers—access to the same account, providing a general transparency and accountability and allowing Uche and Mica as co-researchers to review the teachers’ text communications by agreement. Beyond the research, the teachers also found it useful to be able to review their own texting exchanges.

With Google Voice, teachers can view and send texts from a computer without texting charges. Teachers can also take advantage of a computer’s larger screen and familiar interface to view texts arranged by student or time, and easily search through their history of texts. Teachers can check received messages on their smart phones via specially designed apps, or they can choose to have the service forward any texts to their feature phones’ regular text messaging accounts. (A feature phone is a cell phone that does not have installable apps from an app store.)

The simplest add on to Google Voice so far was to create a one to many “blast” that the teachers could use to message their entire class. Seth, our developer, connected the teachers’ Google Voice accounts to group texting software made with the Twilio API, to afford teacher-whole class messaging. The setup created a proxy phone number for a new “group” of all of the teacher’s students. The teacher only had to send a message to that number and the associated students would all receive the message. (With regular Google Voice, you can only text 5 people at a time). However, because of the difficulty in maintaining and updating the custom designed software, we will be trying out commercial software such as GroupMe or Beluga for group and whole-class texting going forward. These application/services, like Google Voice, can operate through an app on a smart phone, or by forwarding messages to phone numbers on feature phones.

Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support

2011-10-17T01:17:16Z

209.6.84.160: /* Our work, and our ¡Ahas! */

[[Image:Juneresearchday.jpg|thumb|Teachers and students analyzing texting in June 2011]]

''Written by Mica Pollock, Uche Amaechi, Maureen Robichaux, and Ted O'Brien for the texting project, with input from students at Full Circle/Next Wave

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In the texting pilot, we all set forth to learn how texting might enable supporters in each young person’s life to communicate rapidly with the young person -- both about how he/she is doing personally and academically and about actions that might enable his/her success.

[[Image:Textingresearchday.jpeg|thumb|Students and teachers analyzing (anonymized) examples of student-teacher texts: Research Day at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, April 2011]]

Of the various technologies in our lives, it is cell phones that are with us all day, and keep us most connected and available. Texting (often called “SMS”) and other mobile text based communications (like instant messaging) give people particular control over when and where they communicate. In theory, people can review and respond to texts at their leisure--in the evening from home, or over the weekend after sports practice. But a text is particularly hard to ignore, and responses to texts often arrive in seconds -- which is why in summer 2010, Somerville students told us to try texting for rapid youth support (see the full story [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here.]].

They were on to something: texting has been shown to be a particularly used channel for youth communication today. According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study on teenage use of mobile phones, teen use of texting has increased dramatically since 2006 (Campbell et al, 2010). Between 2006 and 2010, the percentage of all teens that used text messaging doubled from 27% to 54%. The only other communication medium that increased during those dates showed more muted gains: cell phone calls increased from 34-38% and the use of social networking sites increased from 21-25%. While calls remained a “critically important function” for teens, especially when communicating with parents, teens were clearly taking to texting in a much more dramatic way than any other communication medium. By 2009, the use of texting had increased among young people between the ages of 12 and 17: on average, older teens were even more likely to text than younger ones (Campbell et al, 2010). Furthermore, the Pew Polls have found that 70% of teens use texting to do "things related to school work," and a smaller but more dedicated 23% of teens use texting for school at least daily. Texting seems to be used more for general school-related communications than for detailed discussions of assignments and homework: 30% of all students and 45% of poor students specifically report never texting about school assignments (Campbell et al, 2010).

In its small character capacity, texting may not be an obvious choice for discussions of the details of homework. But by providing a channel for anytime sharing of basic information and typically informal, individualized information about life and school experiences, we thought texting might be able to support the sort of ongoing personalized attention we know is necessary for supporting young people in schools.

Still, do a Google search for student-teacher texting and most of what you will find is fear: districts considering bans on texting or teachers quietly posting updates about their own personal experiences with trying it. Many view texting as an inappropriate mode of communication between teachers and students, for several main reasons. Even more a year ago than now, texting feels like a “youth”-owned medium. Also, because texting really feels like a private “tube” between two people, the sort of support texting can offer immediately seems particularly personal. That privacy is exactly what scares some people about misuse: teachers and students somehow seem more “alone together” while texting (even though private classroom conversations after school are equally “alone”). Texting also extends the boundaries of potential communication with students outside the school day and into teachers’ own afterschool lives.

Instead of just fearing texting, we decided to learn together what it could offer public school communities. So, we – teachers, researchers, and students -- rolled out a texting pilot with 40 students across multiple classrooms. As we describe in more detail [Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|[here,]] some teachers in Somerville weren’t ready to try texting for reaching their students; these students and teachers were. They really were pioneers in testing how a communication tool already in the hands of most young people in the building could be pulled in for everyday student support.

In some ways, our site -- Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative school -- is a special school: all teachers work in what our participating high school teacher Ted called “teacher-counselor mode” and expect personal support relationships as part of their job. Each teacher has a co-counseling group that meets twice a week, where he/she gets to know more about young people’s personal struggles. Teachers work in a “triangle” with clinicians and students’ other counselors. But really, teachers at FC/NW are simply encouraged by their school to build teacher-student support relationships, something every teacher has to do but may not have the time or the administrative support to do.

So far, we have been testing one-to-one (private) texting between teachers and students, and secondarily, between students and eight graduate student mentors from the Harvard Graduate School of Education who helped us connect to the students to check in. We’re using Google Voice, a free service that records all of the texts in teachers’ inboxes. This allowed two researchers in the group (Uche and Mica) to review the texts along with teachers to see if they were helpful -- with students’ advance, overall permission. (GoogleVoice also gives teachers a separate phone number, so they’re not using their personal phone.)

Since starting, we’ve seen student-teacher texting after and before school take off successfully with middle and high school youth. In the fall, we plan to test ways to enable youth and a "team" of their chosen supporters (including afterschool providers, peers, and family members) to communicate about any topic via group texting.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?
-------

[[Image:textingteachersteam.jpg|thumb|Mo and Ted, texting teacher pioneers, with Uche and Mica. . .and donuts]]

Design based research is usually about proceeding in very clear “stages” to test something. As stated earlier, we wanted to test rapid support communications among a “team” of youths’ chosen supporters. We began with testing a school-based online social network and eventually moved toward testing one-to-one texting instead, with the vision of testing out “team” texting next.

So, our work proceeded in stages and also in a rolling manner over two years, based on ongoing reactions to students’ and teachers’ insights and interests re. support communications that might assist youth.

Throughout, we kept our core questions constant. Who needs to share which information with whom, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome? And, we came to ask: how might texting enable (or not enable) the rapid exchanges of information and caring often so needed to support young people?

Note: Unlike in our ePortfolio pilot, where the goal was to create ePortfolios that would succeed and stick at Somerville High School, we decided in this case not to “make sure texting works, by doing whatever is necessary to make it work.” Instead, we wanted to explore how teachers and students would use (or NOT use) texting in youth support, if they were just explicitly invited to text for school-related communication. We also wanted to know if some type or series of communications could help make a young person more connected to school or more successful academically.

So, in a nutshell, we offered the channel and waited to see what everyone would do with it. We didn’t push any particular use of the texting, but instead kept talking about actual uses. Mo, Ted, and the students became a research team with Uche, Mica, and the HGSE students, together exploring the use of texting in rapid youth support. We put our Ford support resources into stipending teachers $25/hr (2 hrs/week) for their extra time piloting the tool and analyzing data, paying kids back with food and $25/each for a formal “research day,” and supporting Uche to coordinate the pilot. For course credit, HGSE students checked in on the students and acted as anytime mentors for young people who wanted to share questions or thoughts via texts. We also agreed to line up tutors or mentors for anyone who wanted one and did for several students—though as we mention in the [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!||full story]], logistics and low interests later fizzled that plan.

We held regular conversations with students and teachers to analyze how the texting was going for them. Eight HGSE students informally interviewed the FC/NW students a few times a month, over donuts at the school. Uche and Mica talked with Ted and Mo, Uche texted regularly with Ted and Mo himself, and Mica took a “team” of students on as a texting partner. Everyone was invited to analyze the texting conversations together in two research events, the first held at Harvard and the second held at the FC/NW building.

Our main '''¡Aha!s''' over time have been these:

'''MAIN ¡Aha!: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.

'''MAIN ¡Aha!: Texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate. People can use regular phones, smart phones, and computers to communicate via text message.

'''¡Aha! Go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.

'''Most of the actual texts that prove these points can be found [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here,]] but we wanted to tempt you by showing you a few more examples of what supportive teacher-student texting can look like:

:Teacher: [Student,] do you still have the math book I gave you for homework? If you do let me know and [teacher] too 2:38 PM

:Student: Ya I do 2:59 PM

:Teacher: Use it! 3:27 PM

:Student: Ok. I will 3:31 PM

:Student: I just left my house right now so I'm going to b late 7:47 AM

:Teacher: And I need to know this? 7:48 AM

:Teacher: Hurry up! 7:49 AM

:Student: Because I don't want you to worry 7:49 AM

:Teacher: You miss school regularly silly goose 7:51 AM

:Student: I came in all this week and collected points 7:54 AM

:Teacher: Get here, we can celebrate 7:55 AM

:Student: Hahaha okk I'm on cross street now 7:58 AM

:Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

:Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

:Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

:Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

''' Want to see more texts? Click [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here!]]

In discussions throughout the year and in several focused data analysis meetings, student and teacher participants argued that texting had two key benefits: individualized, timely student support and the ability to strengthen student-teacher relationships. Students argued that supportive texts from teachers were giving them the motivation or information necessary to come to school on time, complete homework, remain aware of requirements, and participate in afterschool activities. Over the semester, we also saw texting teachers and students having more frequent, and deepening, conversations about school commitments and life struggles, both via text and then in person. In reviewing texts between students and university mentors, we have seen that afterschool supporters can also use texting to build stronger relationships with students and to communicate regularly about careers, jobs, and school persistence.

In sum: most school districts are out to regulate and restrict texting and fear student-teacher texting as somehow inappropriate. We’ve seen that texting can simply extend relationship-building and student support outside of school hours. But this raises several overall questions for public schools. One: adults’ time. If gluing a relationship together outside of the school day helps young people do better in school, is it “worth” teachers’ time? Two: Where do the school walls end? If a teacher supports young people’s school success through wakeup texts or afterschool reminders, is this an appropriate reach into the home or out of the classroom? Three: appropriate student-teacher relationships. If good teaching requires real relationships between students and teachers – a form of friendship with role boundaries-- how can they communicate via today’s most “friendly” media but still within age- and role-appropriate bounds of partnership? It may be that we need to redefine “appropriate” student-teacher relationships in the digital age. As Shelia, age 17, put it in this pilot, texting definitely put students and teachers more “on the same level.” Texting was definitely a “youth medium” when we started, but it may not be for long!

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Ahas! in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ahas, click [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here!]]''''''

Our ¡Ahas! about texting included the following.

'''¡Aha! Texting works when you can’t reach young people any other way for time-sensitive information.

'''¡Aha! Texting helps when students don’t have home phones or literally aren’t in school.

'''¡Aha! Texting can support communication about a wide variety of school issues.

'''¡Aha! We began to see that students and teachers can build personal relationships via text.

'''¡Aha! Fundamental academic support, personal support, and light banter can occur in the same conversation.

'''¡Aha! Texting can build a relationship for school even if you are not talking about school.

'''¡Aha! Texting didn’t supplant face to face conversation. Often, the text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation.

'''¡Aha! As relationships grow, they are documented in texts!

'''¡Aha! Normalizing texting as something students and teachers can do makes it easier to strike up a relationship with a young person.

'''¡Aha! The style of texts can put students and teachers “on the same level.”

'''¡Aha! The many emotions possible via text can give students and teachers a range of ways to share their feelings.

'''¡Aha! Concerns about students being “inappropriate” with the channel may be overblown.

'''¡Aha! Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring because they demonstrated effort by both students and teachers to respond to the other.

'''¡Aha! Texting’s time commitment shows caring and builds relationship. But it also -- takes time!

'''¡Aha! Of course, if your support network uses your phone to reach you, you need a phone.

'''¡Aha! In our brief test of texting between HGSE students and the FC/NW students, we began to see that texting can support ongoing career mentoring, too.

'''¡Aha! Finally, face to face mentoring meetings can be really hard to schedule, making texting even more sensible.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We have successfully supported a pilot of student-teacher texting at Full Circle/Next Wave and have dozens of students and four new teachers excited about continuing. The principal is interested in expanding use of texting to include other current and former teachers within the school. While many teachers still didn’t know how to use a cell phone, some are newly starting to text. We joked that maybe the principal himself would start using our texting “blast” to message his entire staff!

Both students and teachers say that we’ve all demonstrated that texting is a possible tool for communication with young people that mixes personal support, academic support, and everyday banter. We have realized so far that texting is a very natural and important channel not only for check-ins and updates not possible during the school day, but for a key, perhaps ultimate support: building a relationship between student and teacher or adult mentor.

At our April Research Day at Harvard, Obens, one of the students, summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year: “it shows connection. It’s really helpful --- it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on this schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Later in the school year, Obens would point out that texting helped him focus overall on school, but couldn’t keep him focused during class – that was his next frontier for self-improvement. Many students also made clear that while improving student-teacher communication was key, linking in other people in their lives was crucial too. As Mica wrote to herself in February after a group conversation that followed texts with several individual girls, “note: several times in this conversation I felt the need to tell others in the school, things that I was texting about w/ an individual kid, so that others could be pulled in for the collective support.”

So, our next step is to see how texting works with new student and teacher users and also, to test texting “teams.” In fall 2011, we’ll continue teacher-student texting with additional teachers and youth, start teacher-full class texting, and test group texting between chosen “teams” of supporters around individual youth. We’ll see how and if multiple supporters take the opportunity for rapid communications about students’ personal needs.

As we test group texting among “teams” of students’ chosen supporters this fall, we’re going with youth-constructed teams of supporters and we’ll see where they take a group texting tool. We have lots of questions. Is the private and personal nature of communication via one-to-one text a key to its use for rapid student support? If so, can a group text together for youth support, or not? Throughout the pilot, one-to-one texting continued to feel particularly private -- which was, perhaps, why so much relationship-building was possible over it. So, can a “team” use texting to communicate rapidly about student support, or will the “group” communication make texting less desirable? Which communications should be private, which public to a “team”? And who should be in a texting “team”? As one student said, she was now up for texting teachers but not for having her mom aware of her school related “business.” As Ted put it, to “honor the kids’ sense of privacy,” “which communications should go to parents? Which to kids? which to both?”

This will remain our core inquiry in Phase 2 as we move forward to test “team” texting.

Again, we’ll offer youth and “team” the channel and learn together what they do with it!

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:

:-In your school, when students have personal questions or needs, are there ways for them to rapidly reach their supporters?
:-How do teachers supplement their often-limited interactions with students during the school day?
:-How much do teachers communicate with students and families outside of the classroom?
:-What type of relationships and interactions do teachers have with their students, both in and outside of the classroom?
:-What policies, structures, and norms do teachers and students have for interacting outside of class?
:-Could texting help with rapid youth support? What are your reservations about texting, and how might these be addressed?

===Technological how-tos===

Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

'''Setting up Google Voice (screen shots, etc.!) Guidance on this coming soon from Uche!

Google Voice is a free web based phone and text messaging service provided by Google. Google Voice provides a separate phone number that teachers can give out to students. The use of a separate number helps preserve the privacy of teachers’ personal phone numbers. This separate number, coupled with some of the service’s advanced features, such as number blocking, provide the teacher with an added sense of privacy and security. Finally, we chose the Google Voice service because it allowed multiple people—teacher and researchers—access to the same account, providing a general transparency and accountability and allowing Uche and Mica as co-researchers to review the teachers’ text communications by agreement. Beyond the research, the teachers also found it useful to be able to review their own texting exchanges.

With Google Voice, teachers can view and send texts from a computer without texting charges. Teachers can also take advantage of a computer’s larger screen and familiar interface to view texts arranged by student or time, and easily search through their history of texts. Teachers can check received messages on their smart phones via specially designed apps, or they can choose to have the service forward any texts to their feature phones’ regular text messaging accounts. (A feature phone is a cell phone that does not have installable apps from an app store.)

The simplest add on to Google Voice so far was to create a one to many “blast” that the teachers could use to message their entire class. Seth, our developer, connected the teachers’ Google Voice accounts to group texting software made with the Twilio API, to afford teacher-whole class messaging. The setup created a proxy phone number for a new “group” of all of the teacher’s students. The teacher only had to send a message to that number and the associated students would all receive the message. (With regular Google Voice, you can only text 5 people at a time). However, because of the difficulty in maintaining and updating the custom designed software, we will be trying out commercial software such as GroupMe or Beluga for group and whole-class texting going forward. These application/services, like Google Voice, can operate through an app on a smart phone, or by forwarding messages to phone numbers on feature phones.

Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support

2011-10-17T01:15:39Z

209.6.84.160: /* Our work, and our ¡Ahas! */

[[Image:Juneresearchday.jpg|thumb|Teachers and students analyzing texting in June 2011]]

''Written by Mica Pollock, Uche Amaechi, Maureen Robichaux, and Ted O'Brien for the texting project, with input from students at Full Circle/Next Wave

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In the texting pilot, we all set forth to learn how texting might enable supporters in each young person’s life to communicate rapidly with the young person -- both about how he/she is doing personally and academically and about actions that might enable his/her success.

[[Image:Textingresearchday.jpeg|thumb|Students and teachers analyzing (anonymized) examples of student-teacher texts: Research Day at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, April 2011]]

Of the various technologies in our lives, it is cell phones that are with us all day, and keep us most connected and available. Texting (often called “SMS”) and other mobile text based communications (like instant messaging) give people particular control over when and where they communicate. In theory, people can review and respond to texts at their leisure--in the evening from home, or over the weekend after sports practice. But a text is particularly hard to ignore, and responses to texts often arrive in seconds -- which is why in summer 2010, Somerville students told us to try texting for rapid youth support (see the full story [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here.]].

They were on to something: texting has been shown to be a particularly used channel for youth communication today. According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study on teenage use of mobile phones, teen use of texting has increased dramatically since 2006 (Campbell et al, 2010). Between 2006 and 2010, the percentage of all teens that used text messaging doubled from 27% to 54%. The only other communication medium that increased during those dates showed more muted gains: cell phone calls increased from 34-38% and the use of social networking sites increased from 21-25%. While calls remained a “critically important function” for teens, especially when communicating with parents, teens were clearly taking to texting in a much more dramatic way than any other communication medium. By 2009, the use of texting had increased among young people between the ages of 12 and 17: on average, older teens were even more likely to text than younger ones (Campbell et al, 2010). Furthermore, the Pew Polls have found that 70% of teens use texting to do "things related to school work," and a smaller but more dedicated 23% of teens use texting for school at least daily. Texting seems to be used more for general school-related communications than for detailed discussions of assignments and homework: 30% of all students and 45% of poor students specifically report never texting about school assignments (Campbell et al, 2010).

In its small character capacity, texting may not be an obvious choice for discussions of the details of homework. But by providing a channel for anytime sharing of basic information and typically informal, individualized information about life and school experiences, we thought texting might be able to support the sort of ongoing personalized attention we know is necessary for supporting young people in schools.

Still, do a Google search for student-teacher texting and most of what you will find is fear: districts considering bans on texting or teachers quietly posting updates about their own personal experiences with trying it. Many view texting as an inappropriate mode of communication between teachers and students, for several main reasons. Even more a year ago than now, texting feels like a “youth”-owned medium. Also, because texting really feels like a private “tube” between two people, the sort of support texting can offer immediately seems particularly personal. That privacy is exactly what scares some people about misuse: teachers and students somehow seem more “alone together” while texting (even though private classroom conversations after school are equally “alone”). Texting also extends the boundaries of potential communication with students outside the school day and into teachers’ own afterschool lives.

Instead of just fearing texting, we decided to learn together what it could offer public school communities. So, we – teachers, researchers, and students -- rolled out a texting pilot with 40 students across multiple classrooms. As we describe in more detail [Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|[here,]] some teachers in Somerville weren’t ready to try texting for reaching their students; these students and teachers were. They really were pioneers in testing how a communication tool already in the hands of most young people in the building could be pulled in for everyday student support.

In some ways, our site -- Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative school -- is a special school: all teachers work in what our participating high school teacher Ted called “teacher-counselor mode” and expect personal support relationships as part of their job. Each teacher has a co-counseling group that meets twice a week, where he/she gets to know more about young people’s personal struggles. Teachers work in a “triangle” with clinicians and students’ other counselors. But really, teachers at FC/NW are simply encouraged by their school to build teacher-student support relationships, something every teacher has to do but may not have the time or the administrative support to do.

So far, we have been testing one-to-one (private) texting between teachers and students, and secondarily, between students and eight graduate student mentors from the Harvard Graduate School of Education who helped us connect to the students to check in. We’re using Google Voice, a free service that records all of the texts in teachers’ inboxes. This allowed two researchers in the group (Uche and Mica) to review the texts along with teachers to see if they were helpful -- with students’ advance, overall permission. (GoogleVoice also gives teachers a separate phone number, so they’re not using their personal phone.)

Since starting, we’ve seen student-teacher texting after and before school take off successfully with middle and high school youth. In the fall, we plan to test ways to enable youth and a "team" of their chosen supporters (including afterschool providers, peers, and family members) to communicate about any topic via group texting.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points, did we have over time?
-------

[[Image:textingteachersteam.jpg|thumb|Mo and Ted, texting teacher pioneers, with Uche and Mica. . .and donuts]]

Design based research is usually about proceeding in very clear “stages” to test something. As stated earlier, we wanted to test rapid support communications among a “team” of youths’ chosen supporters. We began with testing a school-based online social network and eventually moved toward testing one-to-one texting instead, with the vision of testing out “team” texting next.

So, our work proceeded in stages and also in a rolling manner over two years, based on ongoing reactions to students’ and teachers’ insights and interests re. support communications that might assist youth.

Throughout, we kept our core questions constant. Who needs to share which information with whom, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome? And, we came to ask: how might texting enable (or not enable) the rapid exchanges of information and caring often so needed to support young people?

Note: Unlike in our ePortfolio pilot, where the goal was to create ePortfolios that would succeed and stick at Somerville High School, we decided in this case not to “make sure texting works, by doing whatever is necessary to make it work.” Instead, we wanted to explore how teachers and students would use (or NOT use) texting in youth support, if they were just explicitly invited to text for school-related communication. We also wanted to know if some type or series of communications could help make a young person more connected to school or more successful academically.

So, in a nutshell, we offered the channel and waited to see what everyone would do with it. We didn’t push any particular use of the texting, but instead kept talking about actual uses. Mo, Ted, and the students became a research team with Uche, Mica, and the HGSE students, together exploring the use of texting in rapid youth support. We put our Ford support resources into stipending teachers $25/hr (2 hrs/week) for their extra time piloting the tool and analyzing data, paying kids back with food and $25/each for a formal “research day,” and supporting Uche to coordinate the pilot. For course credit, HGSE students checked in on the students and acted as anytime mentors for young people who wanted to share questions or thoughts via texts. We also agreed to line up tutors or mentors for anyone who wanted one and did for several students—though as we mention in the [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!||full story]], logistics and low interests later fizzled that plan.

We held regular conversations with students and teachers to analyze how the texting was going for them. Eight HGSE students informally interviewed the FC/NW students a few times a month, over donuts at the school. Uche and Mica talked with Ted and Mo, Uche texted regularly with Ted and Mo himself, and Mica took a “team” of students on as a texting partner. Everyone was invited to analyze the texting conversations together in two research events, the first held at Harvard and the second held at the FC/NW building.

Our main '''¡Aha!s''' over time have been these:

'''MAIN ¡Aha!: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.

'''MAIN ¡Aha!: Texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate. People can use regular phones, smart phones, and computers to communicate via text message.

'''¡Aha! Go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.

'''Most of the actual texts that prove these points can be found [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here,]] but we wanted to tempt you by showing you a few more examples of what supportive teacher-student texting can look like:

:Teacher: [Student,] do you still have the math book I gave you for homework? If you do let me know and [teacher] too 2:38 PM

:Student: Ya I do 2:59 PM

:Teacher: Use it! 3:27 PM

:Student: Ok. I will 3:31 PM

:Student: I just left my house right now so I'm going to b late 7:47 AM

:Teacher: And I need to know this? 7:48 AM

:Teacher: Hurry up! 7:49 AM

:Student: Because I don't want you to worry 7:49 AM

:Teacher: You miss school regularly silly goose 7:51 AM

:Student: I came in all this week and collected points 7:54 AM

:Teacher: Get here, we can celebrate 7:55 AM

:Student: Hahaha okk I'm on cross street now 7:58 AM

:Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

:Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

:Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

:Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

''' Want to see more texts? Click [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here!]]

In discussions throughout the year and in several focused data analysis meetings, student and teacher participants argued that texting had two key benefits: individualized, timely student support and the ability to strengthen student-teacher relationships. Students argued that supportive texts from teachers were giving them the motivation or information necessary to come to school on time, complete homework, remain aware of requirements, and participate in afterschool activities. Over the semester, we also saw texting teachers and students having more frequent, and deepening, conversations about school commitments and life struggles, both via text and then in person. In reviewing texts between students and university mentors, we have seen that afterschool supporters can also use texting to build stronger relationships with students and to communicate regularly about careers, jobs, and school persistence.

In sum: most school districts are out to regulate and restrict texting and fear student-teacher texting as somehow inappropriate. We’ve seen that texting can simply extend relationship-building and student support outside of school hours. But this raises several overall questions for public schools. One: adults’ time. If gluing a relationship together outside of the school day helps young people do better in school, is it “worth” teachers’ time? Two: Where do the school walls end? If a teacher supports young people’s school success through wakeup texts or afterschool reminders, is this an appropriate reach into the home or out of the classroom? Three: appropriate student-teacher relationships. If good teaching requires real relationships between students and teachers – a form of friendship with role boundaries-- how can they communicate via today’s most “friendly” media but still within age- and role-appropriate bounds of partnership? It may be that we need to redefine “appropriate” student-teacher relationships in the digital age. As Shelia, age 17, put it in this pilot, texting definitely put students and teachers more “on the same level.” Texting was definitely a “youth medium” when we started, but it may not be for long!

===Communication and implementation ¡Aha!s, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Aha!s in sequence on this project over two years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ahas, click [[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|here!]]''''''

Our ¡Aha!s about texting included the following.

'''¡Aha! Texting works when you can’t reach young people any other way for time-sensitive information.

'''¡Aha! Texting helps when students don’t have home phones or literally aren’t in school.

'''¡Aha! Texting can support communication about a wide variety of school issues.

'''¡Aha! We began to see that students and teachers can build personal relationships via text.

'''¡Aha! Fundamental academic support, personal support, and light banter can occur in the same conversation.

'''¡Aha! Texting can build a relationship for school even if you are not talking about school.

'''¡Aha! Texting didn’t supplant face to face conversation. Often, the text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation.

'''¡Aha! As relationships grow, they are documented in texts!

'''¡Aha! Normalizing texting as something students and teachers can do makes it easier to strike up a relationship with a young person.

'''¡Aha! The style of texts can put students and teachers “on the same level.”

'''¡Aha! The many emotions possible via text can give students and teachers a range of ways to share their feelings.

'''¡Aha! Concerns about students being “inappropriate” with the channel may be overblown.

'''¡Aha! Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring because they demonstrated effort by both students and teachers to respond to the other.

'''¡Aha! Texting’s time commitment shows caring and builds relationship. But it also -- takes time!

'''¡Aha! Of course, if your support network uses your phone to reach you, you need a phone.

'''¡Aha! In our brief test of texting between HGSE students and the FC/NW students, we began to see that texting can support ongoing career mentoring, too.

'''¡Aha! Finally, face to face mentoring meetings can be really hard to schedule, making texting even more sensible.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We have successfully supported a pilot of student-teacher texting at Full Circle/Next Wave and have dozens of students and four new teachers excited about continuing. The principal is interested in expanding use of texting to include other current and former teachers within the school. While many teachers still didn’t know how to use a cell phone, some are newly starting to text. We joked that maybe the principal himself would start using our texting “blast” to message his entire staff!

Both students and teachers say that we’ve all demonstrated that texting is a possible tool for communication with young people that mixes personal support, academic support, and everyday banter. We have realized so far that texting is a very natural and important channel not only for check-ins and updates not possible during the school day, but for a key, perhaps ultimate support: building a relationship between student and teacher or adult mentor.

At our April Research Day at Harvard, Obens, one of the students, summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year: “it shows connection. It’s really helpful --- it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on this schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Later in the school year, Obens would point out that texting helped him focus overall on school, but couldn’t keep him focused during class – that was his next frontier for self-improvement. Many students also made clear that while improving student-teacher communication was key, linking in other people in their lives was crucial too. As Mica wrote to herself in February after a group conversation that followed texts with several individual girls, “note: several times in this conversation I felt the need to tell others in the school, things that I was texting about w/ an individual kid, so that others could be pulled in for the collective support.”

So, our next step is to see how texting works with new student and teacher users and also, to test texting “teams.” In fall 2011, we’ll continue teacher-student texting with additional teachers and youth, start teacher-full class texting, and test group texting between chosen “teams” of supporters around individual youth. We’ll see how and if multiple supporters take the opportunity for rapid communications about students’ personal needs.

As we test group texting among “teams” of students’ chosen supporters this fall, we’re going with youth-constructed teams of supporters and we’ll see where they take a group texting tool. We have lots of questions. Is the private and personal nature of communication via one-to-one text a key to its use for rapid student support? If so, can a group text together for youth support, or not? Throughout the pilot, one-to-one texting continued to feel particularly private -- which was, perhaps, why so much relationship-building was possible over it. So, can a “team” use texting to communicate rapidly about student support, or will the “group” communication make texting less desirable? Which communications should be private, which public to a “team”? And who should be in a texting “team”? As one student said, she was now up for texting teachers but not for having her mom aware of her school related “business.” As Ted put it, to “honor the kids’ sense of privacy,” “which communications should go to parents? Which to kids? which to both?”

This will remain our core inquiry in Phase 2 as we move forward to test “team” texting.

Again, we’ll offer youth and “team” the channel and learn together what they do with it!

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:

:-In your school, when students have personal questions or needs, are there ways for them to rapidly reach their supporters?
:-How do teachers supplement their often-limited interactions with students during the school day?
:-How much do teachers communicate with students and families outside of the classroom?
:-What type of relationships and interactions do teachers have with their students, both in and outside of the classroom?
:-What policies, structures, and norms do teachers and students have for interacting outside of class?
:-Could texting help with rapid youth support? What are your reservations about texting, and how might these be addressed?

===Technological how-tos===

Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

'''Setting up Google Voice (screen shots, etc.!) Guidance on this coming soon from Uche!

Google Voice is a free web based phone and text messaging service provided by Google. Google Voice provides a separate phone number that teachers can give out to students. The use of a separate number helps preserve the privacy of teachers’ personal phone numbers. This separate number, coupled with some of the service’s advanced features, such as number blocking, provide the teacher with an added sense of privacy and security. Finally, we chose the Google Voice service because it allowed multiple people—teacher and researchers—access to the same account, providing a general transparency and accountability and allowing Uche and Mica as co-researchers to review the teachers’ text communications by agreement. Beyond the research, the teachers also found it useful to be able to review their own texting exchanges.

With Google Voice, teachers can view and send texts from a computer without texting charges. Teachers can also take advantage of a computer’s larger screen and familiar interface to view texts arranged by student or time, and easily search through their history of texts. Teachers can check received messages on their smart phones via specially designed apps, or they can choose to have the service forward any texts to their feature phones’ regular text messaging accounts. (A feature phone is a cell phone that does not have installable apps from an app store.)

The simplest add on to Google Voice so far was to create a one to many “blast” that the teachers could use to message their entire class. Seth, our developer, connected the teachers’ Google Voice accounts to group texting software made with the Twilio API, to afford teacher-whole class messaging. The setup created a proxy phone number for a new “group” of all of the teacher’s students. The teacher only had to send a message to that number and the associated students would all receive the message. (With regular Google Voice, you can only text 5 people at a time). However, because of the difficulty in maintaining and updating the custom designed software, we will be trying out commercial software such as GroupMe or Beluga for group and whole-class texting going forward. These application/services, like Google Voice, can operate through an app on a smart phone, or by forwarding messages to phone numbers on feature phones.