Oneville Wiki - User contributions [en]

File:PollockIt Takes a NetworkJuly2012finalforpublication.pdf

2012-10-27T00:57:13Z

Micapollock: uploaded a new version of "File:PollockIt Takes a NetworkJuly2012finalforpublication.pdf"

The OneVille Project

2012-08-15T18:32:23Z

Micapollock:

[[Image:Simplifiedonevillemainsliderightlines.jpg]]

==What is the OneVille Project?==

The OneVille Project is a community research and action project in Somerville, Massachusetts (2009-2012).

Our goal: to support community cooperation in young people's success, by supporting communication and collaboration between the diverse people who share young people's lives.

Specifically, people of all ages in our diverse community have been testing how low cost and commonplace technology might help students, educators, families, and other supporters:

:-communicate about '''each young person's''' life and progress;

:-share information, ideas, and resources '''across schools''' and the '''community.'''

==Six Smaller Projects==

The OneVille Project divided up into six smaller projects exploring tools and strategies to help people communicate. Each project has paired local researchers, youth, parents, educators, technologists, and community organizers. We documented the work of each group in its own section:

:'''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Data dashboards]]
:'''[[Eportfolio|Eportfolios]]
:'''[[Summary: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Texting]]
:'''[[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network]]
:'''[[citywide information-sharing|Citywide information sharing]]
:'''[[computer infrastructure|Computer infrastructure]]

You can also click the sidebar to explore each project. Click '''[[Six working groups|here]]''' to see summary descriptions of all projects, as well.

'''Want to discuss this project in another language?'''

''Do you want to discuss our work in another language? Contact mica.pollock@gmail.com and we'll set up a conversation with interpretation. This website is being hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and they are working to add a translation button as well.''

'' '''En Español:''' ¿Desea discutir nuestro trabajo en otro idioma? Envíe un correo electrónico a mica.pollock@gmail.com e estableceremos una conversación con interpretación. Este sitio Web está siendo organizado por el Centro Berkman para el Internet y la Sociedad de la Universidad de Harvard, y están trabajando para añadir un botón de traducción también.''

'' '''Em Português:''' Você quer discutir o nosso trabalho em outro idioma? Contacte mica.pollock@gmail.com e vamos estabelecer uma conversa com interpreter. Este site está sendo organizado pelo Centro Berkman para Internet e Sociedade de Harvard, e eles estão trabalhando para adicionar tradução também.''

'' '''Nan Kreyòl Ayisyen:''' èske ou ta renmen diskite sou travay nou nan yon lòt lang? Kontakte mica.pollock@gmail.com epi konsa nou ka fè yon ti konvèsasyon avèk entèpretasyon. Se sit entènèt sa a ki ap akòmode pa sant Berkman pou entènèt avèk Sosyete nan Harvard epi ki ap travay pou yo ajoute yon bouton pou tradiksyon tou.''

==Visit an archive of our '''[[Oneville Blog]]'''==

The OneVille Project

2012-08-15T18:30:10Z

Micapollock:

[[Image:Simplifiedonevillemainsliderightlines.jpg]]

==What is the OneVille Project?==

The OneVille Project is a community research and action project in Somerville, Massachusetts (2009-2012).

Our goal: to support community cooperation in young people's success, by supporting communication and collaboration between the diverse people who share young people's lives.

Specifically, people of all ages in our diverse community have been testing how low cost and commonplace technology might help students, educators, families, and other supporters:

:-communicate about '''each young person's''' life and progress;

:-share information, ideas, and resources '''across schools''' and the '''community.'''

==Six Smaller Projects==

The OneVille Project divided up into six smaller projects exploring tools and strategies to help people communicate. Each project has paired local researchers, youth, parents, educators, technologists, and community organizers. We documented the work of each group in its own section:

:'''[[Summary: Data dashboards|Data dashboards]]
:'''[[Eportfolio|Eportfolios]]
:'''[[Summary: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Texting]]
:'''[[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network]]
:'''[[citywide information-sharing|Citywide information sharing]]
:'''[[computer infrastructure|Computer infrastructure]]

You can also click the sidebar to explore each project. Click '''[[Six working groups|here]]''' to see summary descriptions of all projects, as well.

==Want to discuss this project in another language?==

''Do you want to discuss our work in another language? Contact mica.pollock@gmail.com and we'll set up a conversation with interpretation. This website is being hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and they are working to add a translation button as well.''

'' '''En Español:''' ¿Desea discutir nuestro trabajo en otro idioma? Envíe un correo electrónico a mica.pollock@gmail.com e estableceremos una conversación con interpretación. Este sitio Web está siendo organizado por el Centro Berkman para el Internet y la Sociedad de la Universidad de Harvard, y están trabajando para añadir un botón de traducción también.''

'' '''Em Português:''' Você quer discutir o nosso trabalho em outro idioma? Contacte mica.pollock@gmail.com e vamos estabelecer uma conversa com interpreter. Este site está sendo organizado pelo Centro Berkman para Internet e Sociedade de Harvard, e eles estão trabalhando para adicionar tradução também.''

'' '''Nan Kreyòl Ayisyen:''' èske ou ta renmen diskite sou travay nou nan yon lòt lang? Kontakte mica.pollock@gmail.com epi konsa nou ka fè yon ti konvèsasyon avèk entèpretasyon. Se sit entènèt sa a ki ap akòmode pa sant Berkman pou entènèt avèk Sosyete nan Harvard epi ki ap travay pou yo ajoute yon bouton pou tradiksyon tou.''

==Visit an archive of our '''[[Oneville Blog]]'''==

About Us: Basic Facts

2012-08-07T19:01:01Z

Micapollock:

'''How we got started

With pilot funding from the Ford Foundation in fall 2009, we started off with a goal shared by many in Somerville: supporting community collaboration in young people's success. Many of Somerville's students, families, educators, leaders, and technologists wanted to experiment (or were experimenting) with tools and strategies to spark and support everyday partnership in and around their diverse, mixed-income, and multilingual community. We used Ford funding to support projects already rolling in the community and to spark others that hadn’t yet begun. A grant from the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine, of the MacArthur Foundation, helped us finish this documentation and share some initial ¡Ahas!. For more on our participatory design research approach, click '''[[Participatory design research|here!]]''' Click '''[[Six working groups|here]]''' to see mini descriptions of all projects, or just go check out any project via the sidebar.

'''Somerville

Somerville (population approx. 77,000) represents the diversity, complexity, and typical divisions of a large city, in terms of languages (42), racial-ethnic groups (with large Central American, Brazilian, and Haitian immigrant populations), and economic groups (with a long working class and college-student history, and recent explosion of young professionals and white middle class families). According to the state, 63% of all students in the SPS are members of “racial/ethnic minority” groups, and 68% receive free and reduced price lunch.
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/student.aspx?orgcode=02740000&orgtypecode=5&leftNavId=305&
People often talk about there being multiple "Villes" -- new gentrifiers, new immigrants, and an longstanding white working class. There's also a fourth "Ville" of local university students and grads. It's been the perfect place to explore ways of supporting collaboration across One "Ville"!

'''Our Team

(This is only a partial list of the many people who have contributed to this project, either with great ideas or with many hours of their time!)

''Mica Pollock, Uche Amaechi, Seth Woodworth, Susan Klimczak, Alice Mello, Consuelo Perez, Jedd Cohen, Tona Delmonico, Gina d’Haiti, Sofia Perez, Will Thalheimer, Dave Sullivan, Tracy Sullivan, Michelle Thompson, Josh Wairi, Jen Capuano, Maria Gemma Cruz, Greg Nadeau, Christine Rafal, Bern Ewah, Maria Carvalho, Lupe Ojeda, Ivanete Calmon, Veronaise Chaiki, Adriana Guereque, Maria Oliveira, Manoj Archarya, Claudia Ramos, Michele Arroyo-Staggs, Rachel Toon, Healey students, Michael Quan, Marisa Wolsky, other Healey parents and teachers, Mo Robichaux, Ted O’Brien, David Willey, Shelia Harris, Sally Brith, Maryanne Beaton, Tim Dunphy, Kini Griffin, Edith Medeiros, other Full Circle/Next Wave teachers and students, HGSE graduate student texting mentors, Sabrina Trinca, Michelle Li, Chris Glynn, Michael Maloney, Sibby LaGambina, other SHS eportfolio students and teachers (see [[Eportfolio|eportfolio]] section), Vince McKay, Tony Pierantozzi, John Breslin, Gretchen Kinder, Jason DeFalco, Purnima Vadhera, Tony Ciccariello, Regina Bertholdo, other PIC staff, Marlon Ramdehal, Lisa Brukilacchio, Mark Niedergang, Adam Sweeting, EliJAH Starr, Sooz Kaup, Caroline Meeks, Andi Tepper, Derek Redfern, Franklin DaLembert, Lince Semerzier, Kathleen Jones, Stephanie Hirsch, Sarah Davila, Ana Maria Nieto, Warren Goldstein-Gelb, Rusty Carlock, Maggie Ward, Evan Burchard, David Lord, Barry Stein, Joe Beckmann, Al Willis, and Mark Tomizawa

'''Schools and Community Organizations
:K-8 Healey School: working with [[Summary: Data dashboards|data dashboards]] and the [[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Parent Connector Network]]
:Somerville High School: working with [[Eportfolio|ePortfolios]]
:Full Circle/Next Wave: working to test [[Summary: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|texting]]
:Clarendon Hill Housing Authority/Haitian Coalition: working on [[Computer infrastructure|computer infrastructure]]

Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2012-07-25T16:17:54Z

Micapollock:

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, 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, Adriana Guereque, Maria Oliveira, Manoj Archarya, Claudia Ramos, and Michele Arroyo-Staggs).

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

[[Image:Gina.jpg|thumb|Gina, Connector to Haitian Creole speaking parents]]

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

Ensuring that everyone in a school can partner in student success requires overcoming structural barriers to communication between the school and families who share it. With parents, teachers, staff, and administrators at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville, we've been working toward a toolkit of tools and strategies for schoolwide communication that includes families across lines of language, income, background, literacy skills, and tech access/training. Over the course of three years, we met parents particularly committed to improving schoolwide communication and linked them in to lead the design effort.

In 2010-11 and 2011-12, we focused particularly on strategies for including immigrant parents in the loop of school information and input. We focused on creating the infrastructure of a "Parent Connector Network," in which bilingual volunteer parents ("Connectors") help get information to and from immigrant parents who speak their language. Parents and staff have been figuring out how a combination of face-to-face communication strategies and inexpensive technology can help ensure that all parents in a multilingual and mixed-income school can access important school information and share ideas with other parents and school staff.

'''Basic Parent Connector Network Model (see the bottom of this Summary page for our full set of final "components"):
[[Image:Slide3new.jpg|Slide3new.jpg]]

'''Watch a video of Parent Connectors describing their experience creating the Parent Connector Network:'''

<videoflash type="youtube>xMtoxUyPSU0</videoflash>

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

:*'''¡Aha! Along with strong intentions to include all families, diverse schools need systems -- infrastructure -- for getting information to everyone and input from everyone. If structures don’t exist to get info out and input in, information just doesn’t get distributed, translated, or shared despite good intentions. And parent-school partnerships that could happen, don’t.

:*'''¡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.

:*'''¡Aha! Building relationships -- so diverse parents feel comfortable sharing information and ideas -- is as important as ensuring access to information and ideas.

===How do Parent Connectors work? How would it be implemented?===

:*'''The core of the Connector Network model is 2-way home-school communication facilitated by bilingual parent Connectors''' (with the coordination help of a school-based parent liaison or staff). If willing, '''bilingual parents ("Connectors") might volunteer '''time to build relationships with immigrant families who speak their language and help get information to and from them. Click '''[[Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|here]]''' to see how we got to this point.
:*'''Connectors can call 3-5 other families once a month '''to share key information from the principal/school and to ask questions about any issues parents are facing. Connectors may accompany their families to PTA conferences and/or help them to request interpretation and set up meetings with teachers. We also learned that '''face-to-face, parent-parent relationship-building''' in school social events, like our Multilingual Coffee Hour, is key even while calls home can help with initial connections and information access. Also, we're now learning that Connectors may connect perhaps most effectively to same-language parents who share their child's own grade.
:*'''Translating material efficiently requires organization -- a system for triaging and translating school information for families.''' While translating official documents will always require professional translation, '''volunteer or stipended “translator of the month” Connectors can help paid staff prioritize and translate '''school information. Bilingual volunteers can also help school staff share such information out via a multilingual schoolwide parent listserv and strategic use of school robocalls.
:*'''Translated public information and parent FAQs can also go onto a free multilingual hotline to reach people who rely more on phones than the internet''' (contact us if you want to create a hotline!).
:*'''Because parent volunteer availability changes, the Network needs to recruit Parent Connectors each year and on an ongoing basis.
:* '''Connectors can become constant innovators of communication infrastructure. Healey Connectors in this project constantly asked, "How can we reach families more effectively?" '''In the spring of 2012, we started experimenting with: Connectors providing informal interpretation for parents trying to connect to teachers and staff, when families drop off their kids early in the morning or pick them up in the afternoon; creating a translated public list of services that all parents are entitled to regardless of documentation status, so that all parents and teachers are informed of what's available; and hosting multilingual parent coffee hours around town in addition to inside the school. Parents also have suggested that hosting multilingual school-related events where parents already gather (e.g., church) may be just as effective as trying to bring parents to school-based events.
:*In sum, '''face-to-face elements of the Connector infrastructure by spring 2012''' included the following: a '''multilingual coffee hour, where parents can meet each other and ask questions of the principal;''' '''Connectors who link parents seeking translation, to staff before and after school;''' a '''process for Connectors to triage and then, translate key school information on to a school hotline and other channels; and '''social events where Connectors meet other parents.'''
:*'''Technological elements of the Connector infrastructure''' include '''phone calls home,''' a '''hotline''' and a strategic use of '''robocalls''' for getting information to all families, a '''secure online spreadsheet''' of parent contact info for Connectors, a '''Googledoc''' of basic contact info/citywide parent services info all Connectors need to know https://docs.google.com/document/d/15eF7hZP5DUCwl92WTYcOrElUWDICTdx69WjDgs8UfOI/edit, and a '''fall parent communication form''' (see [[File: Healey School Communications Sign-Up Form 2011.pdf|Healey School Communications Sign-Up Form 2011.pdf]]) to help parents sign up to get a Connector and allow parents to record their preferences for contact. We’ve also been exploring computer training of parents.
:*'''Here's a full diagram of the infrastructure model we created and tested:'''
[[Image:Revisedinfrastructure.jpg|Revisedinfrastructure.jpg]]

:*'''([[Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Here's]] a link to the story of how we got to the point of testing this “infrastructure” for multilingual translation and interpretation.)

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

:➢ Can everyone who needs to get and share important school information, get and share it? Do parents know who to talk to when they need information?
:➢ 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 local 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 and strengthen 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?

=== The Next Layer: Connecting to Folks Doing Similar Work in Other Communities.===

We'd love to spark a lively exchange between people working on similar things.

'''Want to talk further?

Are you working on improving communications in your own school or community?

Contact point people for the Parent Connector Network directly at:

Jedd Cohen (jic378@mail.harvard.edu); Tona DelMonico (tona_d@comcast.net) Ana Maria Nieto (amn956@mail.harvard.edu); questions on our first 2 years can go to Mica Pollock (mica.pollock@gmail.com)

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

The OneVille Project

2012-07-24T13:47:03Z

Micapollock: /* Six Smaller Projects */

The OneVille Project

2012-07-24T13:46:09Z

Micapollock: /* Six Smaller Projects */

The OneVille Project

2012-07-24T13:45:23Z

Micapollock:

About Us: Basic Facts

2012-07-23T16:35:24Z

Micapollock:

'''How we got started

With pilot funding from the Ford Foundation in fall 2009, we started off with a goal shared by many in Somerville: supporting community collaboration in young people's success. Many of Somerville's students, families, educators, leaders, and technologists wanted to experiment (or were experimenting) with tools and strategies to spark and support everyday partnership in and around their diverse, mixed-income, and multilingual community. We used Ford funding to support projects already rolling in the community and to spark others that hadn’t yet begun. A grant from the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine, of the MacArthur Foundation, helped us finish this documentation and share some initial ¡Ahas!. For more on our participatory design research approach, click '''[[Participatory design research|here!]]''' Click '''[[Six working groups|here]]''' to see mini descriptions of all projects, or just go check out any project via the sidebar.

'''Somerville

Somerville (population approx. 77,000) represents the diversity, complexity, and typical divisions of a large city, in terms of languages (42), racial-ethnic groups (with large Central American, Brazilian, and Haitian immigrant populations), and economic groups (with a long working class and college-student history, and recent explosion of young professionals and white middle class families). According to the state, 63% of all students in the SPS are members of “racial/ethnic minority” groups, and 68% receive free and reduced price lunch.
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/student.aspx?orgcode=02740000&orgtypecode=5&leftNavId=305&
People often talk about there being multiple "Villes" -- new gentrifiers, new immigrants, and an longstanding white working class. There's also a fourth "Ville" of local university students and grads. It's been the perfect place to explore ways of supporting collaboration across One "Ville"!

'''Our Team

(This is only a partial list of the many people who have contributed to this project, either with great ideas or with many hours of their time!)

''Mica Pollock, Uche Amaechi, Seth Woodworth, Susan Klimczak, Alice Mello, Consuelo Perez, Jedd Cohen, Tona Delmonico, Gina d’Haiti, Sofia Perez, Will Thalheimer, Dave Sullivan, Tracy Sullivan, Michelle Thompson, Josh Wairi, Jen Capuano, Maria Gemma Cruz, Greg Nadeau, Christine Rafal, Bern Ewah, Maria Carvalho, Lupe Ojeda, Ivanete Calmon, Veronaise Chaiki, Adriana Guereque, Maria Oliveira, Manoj Archarya, Claudia Ramos, Michele Arroyo-Staggs, Rachel Toon, Healey students, Michael Quan, Marisa Wolsky, other Healey parents and teachers, Mo Robichaux, Ted O’Brien, David Willey, Shelia Harris, other Full Circle/Next Wave teachers and students, HGSE graduate student texting mentors, Sabrina Trinca, Michelle Li, Chris Glynn, Michael Maloney, Sibby LaGambina, other SHS eportfolio students and teachers (see [[Eportfolio|eportfolio]] section), Vince McKay, Tony Pierantozzi, John Breslin, Gretchen Kinder, Jason DeFalco, Purnima Vadhera, Tony Ciccariello, Regina Bertholdo, other PIC staff, Marlon Ramdehal, Lisa Brukilacchio, Mark Niedergang, EliJAH Starr, Sooz Kaup, Caroline Meeks, Andi Tepper, Derek Redfern, Franklin DaLembert, Lince Semerzier, Kathleen Jones, Stephanie Hirsch, Sarah Davila, Ana Maria Nieto, Warren Goldstein-Gelb, Rusty Carlock, Maggie Ward, Evan Burchard, David Lord, Barry Stein, Joe Beckmann, Al Willis, and Mark Tomizawa

'''Schools and Community Organizations
:K-8 Healey School: working with [[Summary: Data dashboards|data dashboards]] and the [[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Parent Connector Network]]
:Somerville High School: working with [[Eportfolio|ePortfolios]]
:Full Circle/Next Wave: working to test [[Summary: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|texting]]
:Clarendon Hill Housing Authority/Haitian Coalition: working on [[Computer infrastructure|computer infrastructure]]

About Us: Basic Facts

2012-07-23T16:29:59Z

Micapollock:

'''How we got started

With pilot funding from the Ford Foundation in fall 2009, we started off with a goal shared by many in Somerville: supporting community collaboration in young people's success. Many of Somerville's students, families, educators, leaders, and technologists wanted to experiment (or were experimenting) with tools and strategies to spark and support everyday partnership in and around their diverse, mixed-income, and multilingual community. We used Ford funding to support projects already rolling in the community and to spark others that hadn’t yet begun. A grant from the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine, of the MacArthur Foundation, helped us finish this documentation and share some initial ¡Ahas!. For more on our participatory design research approach, click '''[[Participatory design research|here!]]''' Click '''[[Six working groups|here]]''' to see mini descriptions of all projects, or just go check out any project via the sidebar.

'''Somerville

Somerville (population approx. 77,000) represents the diversity, complexity, and typical divisions of a large city, in terms of languages (42), racial-ethnic groups (with large Central American, Brazilian, and Haitian immigrant populations), and economic groups (with a long working class and college-student history, and recent explosion of young professionals and white middle class families). According to the state, 63% of all students in the SPS are members of “racial/ethnic minority” groups, and 68% receive free and reduced price lunch.
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/student.aspx?orgcode=02740000&orgtypecode=5&leftNavId=305&
People often talk about there being multiple "Villes" -- new gentrifiers, new immigrants, and an longstanding white working class. There's also a fourth "Ville" of local university students and grads. It's been the perfect place to explore ways of supporting collaboration across One "Ville"!

'''Our Team

(This is only a partial list of the many people who have contributed to this project, either with great ideas or with many hours of their time!)

''Mica Pollock, Uche Amaechi, Seth Woodworth, Susan Klimczak, Alice Mello, Consuelo Perez, Jedd Cohen, Tona Delmonico, Gina d’Haiti, Sofia Perez, Will Thalheimer, Dave Sullivan, Tracy Sullivan, Michelle Thompson, Josh Wairi, Jen Capuano, Maria Gemma Cruz, Greg Nadeau, Christine Rafal, Bern Ewah, Maria Carvalho, Lupe Ojeda, Ivanete Calmon, Veronaise Chaiki, Adriana Guereque, Maria Oliveira, Manoj Archarya, Claudia Ramos, Michele Arroyo-Staggs, Rachel Toon, Healey students, Michael Quan, Marisa Wolsky, other Healey parents and teachers, Mo Robichaux, Ted O’Brien, David Willey, Shelia Harris, Full Circle/Next Wave students, Sabrina Trinca, Michelle Li, Chris Glynn, Michael Maloney, Sibby LaGambina, other SHS eportfolio students and teachers (see [[Eportfolio|eportfolio]] section), Vince McKay, Tony Pierantozzi, John Breslin, Gretchen Kinder, Jason DeFalco, Purnima Vadhera, Tony Ciccariello, Regina Bertholdo, other PIC staff, Marlon Ramdehal, Lisa Brukilacchio, Mark Niedergang, EliJAH Starr, Sooz Kaup, Caroline Meeks, Andi Tepper, Derek Redfern, Franklin DaLembert, Lince Semerzier, Kathleen Jones, Stephanie Hirsch, Sarah Davila, Ana Maria Nieto, Warren Goldstein-Gelb, Rusty Carlock, Maggie Ward, Evan Burchard, David Lord, Barry Stein, Joe Beckmann, Al Willis, and Mark Tomizawa

'''Schools and Community Organizations
:K-8 Healey School: working with [[Summary: Data dashboards|data dashboards]] and the [[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Parent Connector Network]]
:Somerville High School: working with [[Eportfolio|ePortfolios]]
:Full Circle/Next Wave: working to test [[Summary: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|texting]]
:Clarendon Hill Housing Authority/Haitian Coalition: working on [[Computer infrastructure|computer infrastructure]]

Citywide information-sharing

2012-07-23T16:22:12Z

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

''Notes by Mica Pollock (OneVille PI, 2009-11)

==Communication we hoped to improve==

Somerville is full of people who actively forward information on youth and family opportunities to one another via email listservs (typically, in English); some host blogs and calendars, or run cable, radio, and newspaper networks. But as one person put it in a public meeting we held to explore the issue of citywide information-sharing, "Right now we have 40 or 50 places to share": lots of information in many places, rather than any single "hub" for ongoing opportunity-sharing related to youth and families.

We found that many people were interested in or working on experimenting with solutions for citywide information-sharing, particularly multilingual, lower-tech solutions to better circulate information and opportunities available for young people and families in the city. We wanted to support such citywide circulation of information but had the capacity just to get started on this piece of the work. We hosted an open brainstorm and supported some production of multilingual tools (e.g., public videos) enabling more youth/families to hear about community resources and events.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

In July 2010, we had a meeting of "mediamakers" from Somerville and brainstormed some citywide issues of communicating opportunities and information related to young people.

The conversation was full of great '''¡Ahas! about improving communications across a city! [[Citywide info-sharing public meeting notes|Anonymized notes]] can be found here.

After this brainstorm, group energy was for a community calendaring project of some kind, for event-sharing. So, from there, the OneVille Project attempted to assist community calendaring by supporting the district's communications director to develop the district's calendaring further, since the district was furthest along as a possible "hub" for community calendaring of child- and youth-related activities. (She also had the District using Twitter actively!). In the end, she spiffed up the district's calendar on her own.

To try a new way of circulating public information, we then supported a multilingual video effort by Consuelo Perez at Somerville Community Access Television, sharing out services for young children available at several community organizations. Bilingual staff at the organizations recorded their information in both languages. The editor, Nina Hasin, experimented with ways to mix pictures with translation to bring the information alive. A next idea -- to run the video in public places -- hit up against the idea that there weren't many public screens. Would a paper bulletin board in public places, like in front of Market Basket supermarket, be just as good for sharing information on services available for families?

In 2011, we learned about related civic media projects underway at the Center for Civic Media at MIT (http://civic.mit.edu/). Leo Burd, a friend then at the CCM, then made our '''hotline''' for the '''[[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Parent Connector Network]],''' using his VOIPDrupal software. It's possible that such infrastructure, which supports multilingual info-sharing via voice-messaging, computer, and text, could eventually be useful at a citywide scale. Leo worked on a similar project at a citywide scale in Lawrence [[http://www.whatsuplawrence.org/]].

CCM has also been trying to make electronic signs outside of businesses in Somerville, sharing bus information. CCM hosted a next conversation about community calendaring in fall 2012.

We also learned of a really exciting example of citywide info-sharing in Brazil, when its creator was in residence in Boston for a bit in 2011: the Catraca Livre effort (http://radarurbano.com.br/opencitylabs/?page_id=25). The Catraca Livre model relies on youth and adult bloggers circulating information on free opportunities in their city via a central hub as well as their individual blogs. We also met Emerson College colleague Eric Gordon, whose Community Plan-It game is being piloted in the Boston Public Schools, engaging community members of all ages in dialogue about school improvement issues (https://communityplanit.org/en-us/).

With five other working groups going, we ran out of capacity and time to further pursue the citywide aspect of "communication infrastructure" work in 2009-11. But we now believe firmly that it's crucial to design citywide info-sharing infrastructure in every city, for sharing opportunities related to youth and families; everywhere we go, we hear about youth and families unaware of what's available (even for free) for supporting young people. We had capacity only to begin citywide work in our pilot phase, but we met a lot of people working on the issue; for example, see the new and growing Somerville Family Learning Collaborative: http://www.somerville.k12.ma.us/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?sectiondetailid=17870.

Broader initiatives clarify the importance of such a focus in each community (http://www.knightcomm.org/the-community-information-toolkit-version-1-0/).

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

To ask in any community:

:In this community, do most people know about resources, opportunities, and services available for youth and families?

:If not, what channels would help them get this information?

Citywide information-sharing

2012-07-23T16:20:08Z

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

''Notes by Mica Pollock (OneVille PI, 2009-11)

==Communication we hoped to improve==

Somerville is full of people who actively forward information on youth and family opportunities to one another via email listservs (typically, in English); some host blogs and calendars, or run cable, radio, and newspaper networks. But as one person put it in a public meeting we held to explore the issue of citywide information-sharing, "Right now we have 40 or 50 places to share": lots of information in many places, rather than any single "hub" for ongoing opportunity-sharing related to youth and families.

We found that many people were interested in or working on experimenting with solutions for citywide information-sharing, particularly multilingual, lower-tech solutions to better circulate information and opportunities available for young people and families in the city. We wanted to support such citywide circulation of information but had the capacity just to get started on this piece of the work. We hosted an open brainstorm and supported some production of multilingual tools (e.g., public videos) enabling more youth/families to hear about community resources and events.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

In July 2010, we had a meeting of "mediamakers" from Somerville and brainstormed some citywide issues of communicating opportunities and information related to young people.

The conversation was full of great '''¡Ahas! about improving communications across a city! [[Citywide info-sharing public meeting notes|Anonymized notes]] can be found here.

After this brainstorm, group energy was for a community calendaring project of some kind, for event-sharing. So, from there, the OneVille Project attempted to assist community calendaring by supporting the district's communications director to develop the district's calendaring further, since the district was furthest along as a possible "hub" for community calendaring of child- and youth-related activities. (She also had the District using Twitter actively!). In the end, she spiffed up the district's calendar on her own.

To try a new way of circulating public information, we then supported a multilingual video effort by Consuelo Perez at Somerville Community Access Television, sharing out services for young children available at several community organizations. Bilingual staff at the organizations recorded their information in both languages. The editor, Nina Hasin, experimented with ways to mix pictures with translation to bring the information alive. A next idea -- to run the video in public places -- hit up against the idea that there weren't many public screens. Would a paper bulletin board in public places, like in front of Market Basket supermarket, be just as good for sharing information on services available for families?

In 2011, we learned about related civic media projects underway at the Center for Civic Media at MIT (http://civic.mit.edu/). Leo Burd, a friend then at the CCM, then made our '''hotline''' for the '''[[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Parent Connector Network]],''' using his VOIPDrupal software. It's possible that such infrastructure, which supports multilingual info-sharing via voice-messaging, computer, and text, could eventually be useful at a citywide scale. Leo worked on a similar project at a citywide scale in Lawrence [[http://www.whatsuplawrence.org/]]. We also met Emerson College colleague Eric Gordon, whose Community Plan-It game is being piloted in the Boston Public Schools, engaging community members of all ages in dialogue about civic issues (https://communityplanit.org/en-us/).

CCM has also been trying to make electronic signs outside of businesses in Somerville, sharing bus information. CCM hosted a next conversation about community calendaring in fall 2012.

We also learned of a really exciting example of citywide info-sharing in Brazil, when its creator was in residence in Boston for a bit in 2011: the Catraca Livre effort (http://radarurbano.com.br/opencitylabs/?page_id=25). The Catraca Livre model relies on youth and adult bloggers circulating information on free opportunities in their city via a central hub as well as their individual blogs.

With five other working groups going, we ran out of capacity and time to further pursue the citywide aspect of "communication infrastructure" work in 2009-11. But we now believe firmly that it's crucial to design citywide info-sharing infrastructure in every city, for sharing opportunities related to youth and families; everywhere we go, we hear about youth and families unaware of what's available (even for free) for supporting young people. We had capacity only to begin citywide work in our pilot phase, but we met a lot of people working on the issue; for example, see the new and growing Somerville Family Learning Collaborative: http://www.somerville.k12.ma.us/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?sectiondetailid=17870.

Broader initiatives clarify the importance of such a focus in each community (http://www.knightcomm.org/the-community-information-toolkit-version-1-0/).

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

To ask in any community:

:In this community, do most people know about resources, opportunities, and services available for youth and families?

:If not, what channels would help them get this information?

File:PollockIt Takes a NetworkJuly2012finalforpublication.pdf

2012-07-23T15:56:31Z

Micapollock: uploaded a new version of "File:PollockIt Takes a NetworkJuly2012finalforpublication.pdf": updated version july 23

Six projects

2012-07-23T14:35:21Z

2012-07-23T13:48:51Z

Micapollock: /* The Little Things Revisited: The Importance of Connectedness */

These are posts from our blog, 2009-2011. We transferred them here so this wiki could be the main place to find our work.

==Personalizing youth support, one text at a time==
Posted: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:20:34 +0000

The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so, is acting as remote ally.

''Notes by Mica Pollock''

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Back on Nov 14, participants in the OneVille texting project at Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative middle and high schools, took the “stage” at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in our Digital Media and Learning Working Group, to share their past year of efforts to explore the potential of texting for supporting youth-teacher communication.

We discussed how texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. To Mo Robichaux, Next Wave teacher and texting pioneer, 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. Texting created “space for a more level relationship” in which students could discuss personal struggles and school goals, “that then go back like a rubber band, to a teacher-student relationship.”

Students and teachers together set ground rules for appropriate uses of text messaging in schools at the beginning of each year’s work. Almost everyone already had the ability to text; texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate.

At Berkman, texts like this prompted lively discussion of the support relationships texting could afford. As texting teacher Ted had said, “The language that the kids are using to thank and what they do verbally is surprising”:

: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

Often, we noticed, a text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation:

: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.

Our next step: to work with partners at the Berkman Center to produce a teacher guide to the legal/privacy issues raised for those pioneering texting. This year, teachers, students, and OneVille texting pilot coordinator Uche Amaechi are continuing to test texting “teams.” They will wrap up that texting pilot at the end of this year or possibly, next fall, by sharing ¡Ahas! around the community to others wanting to explore texting for youth support and mentoring.

In other OneVille news: Healey bilingual parents and staff, with supporters Jedd Cohen and Ana Maria Nieto, continue to develop the efforts of the Parent Connector Network at the Healey School. They will also produce a parent-friendly “how to” guide to the puzzle pieces that work. Possibly, we will pilot and tweak our administrator and teacher dashboard views with principal and teachers.

We feel very privileged to have participated in these design innovations with the Somerville community.

==Eportfolios: Sparking New Conversations about What Students Can Do==
''Posted: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:53:35 +0000
''Notes by Mica Pollock''

The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so is acting as remote ally.

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Last week, a group of student and teacher eportfolio researcher/designers from Somerville High School came to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, for a rousing share-out of their eportfolio project. After a year of participatory design work, eportfolios are seeding across the High School. Guests from Berkman’s Youth and Media Lab and other Working Group members from MIT, Tufts, and Emerson listened intently, as SHS young people and teachers shared their insights about the new communications about young people’s skills, talents and interests made possible when young people made and shared eportfolio entries.

SHS presenters described how over a year and a half of careful groundwork with the School Improvement Council and then critical participatory design research with dozens of students and teachers at SHS, SHS’s own students and teachers led a transition from the school’s prior portfolios to vibrant online “eportfolios” sharing students’ full range of learning products and accomplishments in and out of school, organized by 21st century skills rather than only in subject areas. From paper folders “locked in a cabinet,” student portfolios by spring 2011 included videos of students narrating their original poetry, solving math equations, and doing physics; interviews with teachers evaluating students’ negotiation skills, and videos of students’ efforts to learn to skateboard; photos and commentary on students’ original art and work experiences; and class assignments students found particularly valuable to their learning. As a student put it, an eportfolio allowed her to “show all of the sides of who I am, in one place,” to share “little cool things about me” as well as evidence of “being a good student.” Teacher Chris Glynn noted that if students entered his class at the beginning of the year with eportfolios communicating their skills and interests, learning would be “so much more individualized!”

Student researchers/eportfolio designers were chosen purposefully to demonstrate a full range of achievement levels and student backgrounds at SHS. As one student put it in the presentation, portfolios supported each student to show themselves as “exemplary,” by encouraging students to consider, document and post their best work done both inside and outside of school. “Every student can shine at this if they put in the time and effort,” a teacher said. “We are representative of the potential that everyone has,” a student agreed.

The energy to make eportfolios is spreading virally across the school, as teachers show each other how to use software and students who see others’ work get excited to post their own.

Now that the OneVille pilot phase of eportfolio design is over, students’ and teachers’ next plan is to make a Somerville High School eportfolio website created to support next schools exploring eportfolios!

==Let’s Spark Family-School Conversations about Student Data==
''Posted: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:08:31 +0000
''By Jedd Cohen, Seth Woodworth, and Josh Wairi

Getting “On the Same Page”: We can all see the data together, from any location

Update December 2011: this post was written this fall, when we expected to pilot the three dashboard views. Due to an undesired lag in final technological development, the “individual view” pilot has been delayed; we may do a small pilot of the “admin view” and “teacher view” this winter. Regardless, code has been created that pulls data out of Somerville’s Student Information System for quick viewing and can be put to use in any such “dashboard” project.

An idea common across Oneville’s projects has been: “A communication gap equals a gap in student service.” In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to share comprehensive student data, 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, and how to communicate with schools about it.

Over the past two years in our “dashboard” project, we – local technologists, teachers, researchers — have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help make sure that key people can go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) for 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.

Three resulting dashboard views are open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers to support each student’s success. Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. We’ve created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows each 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 Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

'''Details: What do the dashboards look like?

The admin and teacher views appear in the form of a colorful chart that allows sorting by up to four columns at a time. Original design model: an Excel spreadsheet made for the Healey School by Greg Nadeau, local parent! Based on feedback from former principal Jason DeFalco, we added: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores, IEP status, and afterschool program name:

[[File:Dashboard.png]]

Based on conversations with new Healey Principal Purnima Vadhera, we’ll also add average attendance over the past several weeks, to compare to the current week’s attendance, and 504 status. We may still add MCAS score and growth, MAP writing score and growth, and DIBELS and MELA-O scores. The updated admin view also creates scatter plots and bar graphs to display the relation between demographics and other data, i.e., achievement or attendance.

The admin and teacher views look like charts, displaying the same types of data for many students. The individual view is organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs at the top of the page allow the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile.

The narrative structure, as well as many decisions about exactly what to display in this view, came out of numerous brainstorming meetings last spring with author and Healey teacher Josh Wairi. We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views in his class in the fall. The individual view presents data such as attendance, grades, MCAS and MAP test scores and growth, and teacher comments – each type of data on its own page accessible by tabs at the top. (Most of this data is in Somerville’s “student information system,” just more scattered; we wanted to get it easily all in one place for a teacher and family/providers to see.) We’ve also created an interactive online version of Somerville’s K-6 report card, which parents are used to getting on a static piece of paper. We plan to add each student’s yearbook photo and data on allotted support services. Next to each ‘chunk’ of student data, “comment/question” boxes provide a space for the parent or afterschool provider to comment on the data by entering text that gets sent to the homeroom teacher’s email:

[[File:Report Card.png]]

On the “Comments” page, the parent or afterschool provider can request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them. Parents 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. (Josh feels that homeroom teachers would like to take the lead in responding to and informing other teachers about families’ comments.)

The Parent Connectors will help to make the user interface available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole (and we’ll use the district’s own translation for the report card). For more ongoing translation (email messages sent to and from parents, parent-teacher conferences, the summary comments on the dashboard), we’re adding links to Google Translate and to the Parent Connector calendar for setting up meetings with interpreters.

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 and next steps:

We’ve asked for feedback on the tool throughout, showing it to administrators, families, and afterschool providers, including focused interviews with parents and students from Josh’s own class. 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!” 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 has 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 enables and encourages parents like her to submit their questions, requests for meetings, and updated contact info to the student’s homeroom teacher, who will 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!

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 could also help close an even more basic communication gap, as Vadhera noted: “Even having this [family dashboard] up there [online] for parents to go back to,” helps when “the report card didn’t get in the backpack, or whatever.” Clearly, no proverbial dogs will eat it once it’s online.

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 that students’ needs have been met. Our tool allows her to sort by IEP and 504 plans, so that all these students appear together, “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, 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 evaluates struggling students – or each student’s individualized group of supporters, e.g. their homeroom teacher, Special Ed or ELL specialists, and reading/math resource room staff. Josh explained that another advantage to the individual view is that 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).

We hope that these dashboards could be useful enough to help ensure that students’ needs are met, spark collaboration among educators, and catch on. As Principal Vadhera explained about our dashboards, “A lot of ideas start like THIS (gestures big with hands). And then they fail. This is a guinea pig, Josh can always share back, move forward in small increments. Maybe teachers would just want to get on board with this!”

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 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.

We hope to work with the PTA this year to create basic computer and email training for Healey parents who need this support. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet. 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.

==Figuring out the infrastructure for interpretation and translation: The Parent Connector Project==
''Posted: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:25:10 +0000

'''A parent recording information for other parents on the "Healey Hotline"

''By Mica Pollock, Gina D’Haiti, Tona Delmonico, and Ana Maria Nieto, for the Parent Connectors

[[File:Mariasethlessblurryhotlinephoto.jpg]]

We had one of our Multilingual Coffee Hours with the principal on Friday, May 20, at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville. Over some Portuguese bread, and coffee supplied by the PTA, we shared some of what we’ve been doing and learning in our Parent Connector project, and brainstormed next steps. The Connector project is a parent-led effort (in partnership with the school administration) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) via a phone tree to immigrant parents who speak their language.

We see the Connectors as one component of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation in a multilingual school. There are other pieces. We’re prototyping a hotline (using open source software and the Twilio API) allowing volunteer Translators of the Month (also bilingual parents, and maybe, students) to verbally translate information all parents need to know (in Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish). Bilingual parents have noted that translating material into their languages verbally – so, speaking it on to a hotline — is easier than doing it word for word from paper to paper. So far, we have parents coming to speak into a computer (see photo!). We hope to hone the hotline so that translators can record to it from home.

We’re working on other components of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation: a Googledoc as one organized place where principal and others put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month; Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. Robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls, but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Small infrastructural “moves” can help: one parent noted that at another school, they put information at the top of every handout indicating where you can go to get a translation (over time, our hotline).

The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Otherwise, disorganization means that things don’t get translated! Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but glitches certainly can block communication too. One example: because our Connector project started mid-year, we had no beginning of the year form for all parents, saying “do you want a Connector? Check here to release your number to them!” So, it took us weeks to work through the Parent Information Center (PIC) to get parents to release their numbers to other parents! (School staff had to figure out how to download a spreadsheet of language-specific numbers for PIC staff from X2, the district’s “student information system”; then the PIC staff had to make the calls home to get parents’ permission to release numbers to the Connectors; then, finally, Connectors got lists and could start calling.)

A key issue we’re trying to understand is where the line is between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/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. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). Which communications could trained adults handle particularly effectively, and at a lower cost than sending everything to the PIC?

==Research Day: Exploring the Potential of Texting for Student-Teacher Communication==
''Posted: Fri, 06 May 2011 01:52:06 +0000

On Saturday, April 21 from 10-1, ten young people and two teachers from Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative high school and middle school, came to a classroom at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. They joined Uche, me, and four other graduate students from the Ed School in “Research Day.” Our goal: to analyze texts students and teachers have been sending each other since the winter, in OneVille’s pilot of texting as a channel for rapid youth support.

We’ve been talking to students and teachers all year as co-researchers, about their experiences testing texting. We’d analyzed specific texts before with Ted and Mo, our teacher participants. But this was our first time sitting together with young people analyzing actual data. Reading transcripts taken from Google Voice (with participants’ permission and anonymized for analysis), students were immediately perceptive about “patterns in the data.” We talked in small groups, and then we shared ideas across the room. My small group included Mo (our Next Wave, middle school teacher), Shelia, Obens, “Juan,” and “Dan” (pseudonyms for initial blogging purposes!).

What we talked about most was how texting can enhance student-teacher relationships and so, students’ engagement with school.

Reading the transcripts, the students noticed first that students and teachers were noticeably polite to each other, texting “thanks and you’re welcome” after texts about permission slips, reminders, and personal check-ins on grades or life.

“The kids haven’t been crossing boundaries in any way – no one has been inappropriate,” Mo said later. Students agreed, saying that with texting, you’d just “give the teacher the same respect you’d give them in school.”

Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring. And that students were grateful for it: “it shows you appreciate the person and you’re thankful they helped you out,” Shelia said. Mo added: “They appreciate (Ted, our Full Circle teacher) taking time out of his own private life to send these texts.” Obens said that texts from Ted had gotten him to school on time.

Wielding her highlighter, Shelia selected another text from Ted to a student as important evidence:

“you need to be in school way more my friend.” “I feel like it’s genuine concern,” she explained. “It shows connection,” Obens added. “It also shows courage.”

He pointed out that the teacher was “taking time to text people about stuff – taking time to get a person to school on time. That shows courage on the part of the teacher. Also on the student, by replying back.” Shelia agreed, adding, “It takes the courage to make that bond – from the teacher — and also for the student to participate in the bond.” Juan added, “Who would want to text a teacher – there’s a lot you could be doing at that time. A lot of people won’t do it – that they do it means they really care about what they are doing.” As evidence, he pointed out a text he himself had sent back to Ted: he had “put in the effort” with responses, like “fine” and “I’ll make it [to school] by 8:10.” “I sleep a lot – but I made it before 8:10. It did help. I was used to coming in around 8:30,” he explained.

Ted highlighted this same point later in the research day: student texts to teachers

“show a level of investment. Even if (the text is) not school related, the student is checking in, making that contact, when they don’t have to. It’s really important to understand – the value of doing things not only when you have to do things.”

Looking again at Ted’s text “you need to be in school way more my friend,” both Mo and Shelia noted that texts put students and teachers “on the same level.” Shelia pointed out Mo’s own text to a student as similarly important: “worried about you.” “It shows that she really cares,” Shelia explained. “You had a bad day yesterday” was pointed out as a particularly caring teacher “check-in.”

Mo then pointed out a student request for information that had happened via text: “hey do you think they’re gonna extend the add drop period?” In class, Obens explained, “I don’t feel like bothering (Ted) w/ those types of questions.“ With texting, relationship-building could continue after the classroom day:

“It definitely strengthens our face to face, day to day relationships,” Ted added. “When you’re texting you feel like you’re close to your teacher,” Obens summed up.

Relationship. Built and strengthened in this private backchannel between people who share a classroom, in a medium more comfortable to students of 2011. “Some people might feel more comfortable saying it via texting more than face to face — because in person you might feel shy, awkward and not know what to say back,” said a student from across the room.

We might chalk this up to a modern aversion to in-person communication: “I’d rather text my parents than call them,” a student added. But reading the actual texts, we saw certain communications that texting may particularly make possible. Joking. Banter. The quick check-ins of care that simply don’t happen in person during busy days.

“She’s making sure the kid doesn’t get in trouble – she asks him to call his mom and stuff,” Juan noted of another of Mo’s texts. “She couldn’t do this face to face b/c he wasn’t in school.”

Pointing out uses of humor in the texts, Juan made another point about how texting could add to student-teacher relationships: people could communicate even if a student was in a bad mood. A face-to-face conversation might end with the student “shouting” out of anger, unable to help it; with texting, you could “be mad” and still “send a funny text.” Another student elaborated relatedly from across the room: with texting, you could overcome the “intimidation” of possible “rejection” by the other person, by sending lighthearted texts across the private channel that did not have to be responded to immediately. Emotion was “easier to handle” via texts, another student said.

Students noted that texts could get a student to come in on time; to focus on his classes; even to care. Obens 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 the 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.”

Over and over that day, we talked about how texts showed not just “connection” but true caring, in both directions. Mo pointed out that one student had asked Ted “how was your weekend.” Students pointed out texts from Ted and Mo like “you made 1 day last week” (“I like the encouragement,” said one student) and “you’re a smart kid” (“That’s really nice because some kids might feel doubt and don’t get many compliments from people,” another student said.). Shelia pointed out that overall, the texts could build relationship and simultaneously, the motivation to try.

“You need to know [teachers] care in order to do stuff. Otherwise what’s the point in trying. If a person is ‘I’m here for you’ – you feel someone else cares, I should care too.”

Furthermore, Shelia added, texts kept that relationship around with you, for later viewing. “With a phone call, it’s out of your head,” Shelia explained. “With a text message it’s still there when you turn on your phone – it still reminds you. You have to delete it if you don’t want it – it’s there to remind you.”

We left sure that texting had “helped” with “connection” in these teachers’ classrooms but unsure how it might work in “a school of like 600,” as someone put it. Full Circle/Next Wave are particularly “personal” schools, some pointed out: “in other schools it’s less personal, you get five minutes with that teacher,” Shelia said. We left with a question: does that lack of “personal” face to face attention in other schools make something like texting more likely to help, or less?

“Have good conversations,” Juan advised others considering texting with students. “Like don’t just talk about school. Also talk about how your day’s going, stuff like that. Don’t just keep it about school.” Ted finished our Research Day with more overall advice: “It’s up to both people to enhance the texting relationship. If the student is just responding “ok” or “yes” or “no,” that doesn’t allow the texting relationship to develop and to go towards communications that aren’t just ‘be on time.’”

==The Little Things Revisited: The Importance of Connectedness==
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:18:03 +0000
''by Uche

In the last blog post I talked about the importance of the low-level support communications between teachers and students at the Oneville site. I posted a few short excerpts in which a teacher was texting students before school in an effort to motivate otherwise disinclined students to come school that day. Such communications, while low level, were nevertheless important because they had an immediate impact– the student in question ultimately came to school–but they also had the simultaneous effect, as the teachers and students told us and I’ll detail below, of strengthening the relationship between teachers and students.

Both parties (students and teachers) maintain that the strengthening of the non-academic aspects of their relationships is essential to supporting and nurturing the academic relationship and communication. When discussing the ‘low level’ nature of some of the conversations with the two teachers, they both claimed that these conversations were important and essential because they helped them build stronger relationships with the students. This strengthening occurred, they maintained, because they got to see the students in a different light than they would normally during the school day through conventional methods. One teachers noted that “the language that the kids are using to thank (them) through texting” is significantly different than what the students use in verbal communication, and that “the difference is surprising. It’s refreshing to know that (the students) have that capability”.

Students also found the texting communications useful in building relationships with their teachers. One student, who admitted to not responding regularly to texts from his teacher still found them useful” “I find it helpful, but I just don’t want to text back”. Moreover, the students suggested that he’d engage with the teacher more over text if “maybe during the weekend (he’d) hear from the teacher about how his weekend is going”. He wanted to learn more about the teacher outside of school. He’d like that, he claimed because “if (they) talk about outside (of school) stuff, (our) relationship will grow even stronger”.

This sense of connectedness described by teachers and students jibes with much of motivational literature that highlights relatedness–a sense of being connected to a larger group–alongside autonomy and a sense of competence, as an essential component of motivation. If we are to be successful in motivating the students not just to come to school, but to become actively involved in their schooling and education, then we, as the supporting community, must acknowledge and respond to their (identified) needs. These low level communications may not be sufficient for helping the students become successful in school and life, but as teachers and students have expressed, they are necessary.

==The Little Things==
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:07:20 +0000 by Uche

Sometimes it’s the little things that matter the most in education: the moments that create and nurture relationships. When I first started with the Oneville Project, I believed that using the medium of texting would allow teachers, students, family members, and other stakeholders involved in the students’ lives to engage in crucial, in depth, involved, and sustained conversations about big picture issues affecting the students’ lives. The sky was the limit, I believed. The texting medium would allow students to get more one on one support from teachers than they would have otherwise received from a distracted teacher, in a crowded classroom, during a busy school day. Students would seek and receive the help they needed from their teachers at a time and place of their own choosing. In some ways, this has all turned out to be true: Mo and Ted, teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave who wanted to see how texting could support their communications with students and students’ supporters, have been texting when and from where they can; students are responding in kind. Communications that couldn’t happen before are happening now. But in many ways, these communications are about things that to an outsider, might seem “small.”

In these early stages of our texting pilot at Somerville site, we’re finding that teachers and students are regularly using texting for what might seem low level interactions — such as nudging students to get up and come to school, in real time:

7:01am TEACHER: Hey (STUDENT), rise and shine!!

7:08 am TEACHER: Hey, you getting up!!

7:36 am STUDENT: You up

7:39 am STUDENT: I made a pancake =D lol

7:41 Eww wait it came out nasty

7:27 am TEACHER: Hey, I’m late

7:27 am TEACHER: Time to get up!!

7:27 am TEACHER: Got a nice flatbread for you!!

7:28 am STUDENT: Ok, I’m up

In these two exchanges we see the teacher prodding and then coaxing the student to get up and come to school. This is not a reminder sent the week or the night before, but a real time push to action; the first and second exchanges are within a 40 and one-minute time frame, respectively. The text based communication modality allows the teacher to reach through her phone and into the students’ house. And in both situations it seems to have worked! Another student recently told one of our research assistants – HGSE students themselves starting to text with students as college mentors – that he was coming to school more often because of these texts. Could the same exchange have happened over the phone? Possibly. Would it have happened? Unlikely. The student would have most likely silenced the phone. But texts are extremely insistent. The only quick way to stop them from coming in is to turn off the phone–which is akin to cutting of an appendage to most students. They could always ignore the phone and not read the message, but how long can/will a teenager ignore their portal to the world?

Although we’re seeing the beginning of larger forward looking conversations – reminder statements about homework, supportive statements about motivation and students’ intelligence — a more startling and significant finding so far is that little communications about little things — like pancakes — could be important to building a relationship, possibly the ultimate need of good teaching. More pragmatically, a teacher can have no impact, and the student no learning, if the student doesn’t show up to school. And while there are sometimes complex and intractable reasons why a student does not show up for school–problems at home, bullying, (arguably) more appealing and remunerative options – sometimes, smaller and more manageable causes are at the root of frequent tardiness and absences. Sometimes the students are just too tired – or too alone — to get out of bed.

Of course the example above raises many obvious questions that are fundamental to anyone exploring uses of social media in education today. 1) What about boundaries–the teacher reaching across settings, into the student’s home? What boundaries of privacy and trust need to be in place for such communications to be okay? 2) Do teachers really have time to do this one on one check up on students? 3) How often should such “wake up calls” occur, before they become demotivating or infantilizing? We’re exploring all of this with students and teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave, and we’ll address these questions in future posts.

==Definition==
Posted: Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:15:10 +0000
'''OneVille’s mission is to facilitate collaboration in young people’s success by co-creating communication solutions linking the people in young people’s lives.

==ePortfolio Reflection from Mike M.==
''Posted: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:03:45 +0000
I started using online portfolios for my AP class last year. When I became part of the ePortfolio project at SHS, I saw what could be done with a ePortfolio and I decided to go farther. What started as a simple online file cabinet for students to store lab reports, became a place for students to reflect and help each other. It also became a place for me to share not only paper solutions and documents, but video to help students work through issues.

It then went further to include how-to videos for other new teachers on how to use lab equipment, and video tutorials for any students on how to use technology like Excel, and some of our digital lab analysis software.

I plan I adding a lot more, and turning my ePortfolio site into a place to share information with my students and fellow teachers. I think having the students make their own sites to post images, labs, reflections etc was invaluable and definitely added to their experience.

In the future I hope something can be put into place that will allow all freshman to develop an ePortfolio that they can utilize throughout their high school career to not only store examples of their best work, but help them organize and prepare for college or jobs, share things they are proud of with their teachers, family and fellow students and express themselves in a way that is actually valuable to their education and become a better human being, as opposed to something limited like twitter or facebook which well, we kind of know what those things are most useful for.

Check out my ePortfolio site at https://sites.google.com/site/somervillephysics/and my official site at http://mrmaloney.com

==Communicating the Whole Student – and Teacher==
''Posted: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 02:44:10 +0000

[[File:EportfolioCrewMarch20113-300x225.jpg]]

''Innovations by the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team, above

''Notes from the audience, by Mica Pollock

Last night, the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team gave a presentation of their work developing ePortfolios since October 2011. Up in front of an audience of nearly 30 from the superintendent’s office, school committee, school improvement council and community, 11 young people and 6 teachers shared how they went about creating their online portfolios and what they learned about themselves in the process.

Somerville High School has a paper portfolio tradition that has been, as one teacher put it, “a cumbersome collection of paper four times a year.” On Monday night, students and teachers discussed the ability to show themselves and their skill sets in multimedia – to colleges, employers, and one another.

As one student put it, the ePortfolio shows “a more accurate portrait of myself.” I was struck by this very thing overall: the rare chance for a student or a teacher, in school, to show other people one’s full self — and the ability of ePortfolios to make this a normal thing.

Zoe showed her mathematics equations, and her participation in the Boston Children’s Chorus opera. Sergio demonstrated his award-winning children’s book, and a gear shift he made by hand in the shop for his own car.

Astrid pointed out that ePortfolios allowed students to get closer to teachers they didn’t know as well; “it allows you to see the background of a student, and you can express yourself.” Clicking through videos on a school SmartBoard, she demonstrated the digital story of a poem she wrote in El Salvador from a hammock, on her iPod; it was the first time presenting her work this publicly, she said, as she had always been shy about sharing her poems.

A teacher, Mr Glynn, noted that he himself had approached the project from the perspective of a learner: what would a teacher need to know to help all students use wiki spaces and google sites? Students using the media had become more critical and self-reflective about their learning, he said, and were taking more control and ownership of it. ePortfolios also had the potential to show both growth and continuity in student skills over time. “These are so much more alive than the paper version of our portfolio,” he said. And his other conclusion about the technology itself: “a freshman in high school can definitely figure this out.”

Doug, a student, pointed out that ePortfolios let students interact with their teachers online, and “get critique” from peers; “students are always in search of some constructive criticism,” he added, pointing out as well that “Somerville High has a diversity of cultures; media and technology cross those boundaries.” As he clicked to some of his essays, a teacher called out that he was an excellent writer and an audience member commented on his large vocabulary; “there are some things that you can’t see that you can show on your ePortfolio,” he finished modestly.

Rocky showed his programming efforts in Java, next to his wacky chicken graphics; online images he had posted demonstrated both his lifelong curiosity about how food gets made (bubble tea was one example) and a long line of successful Somerville report cards. “EPortfolios are to show your improvement over life,” he finished.

Samantha, who said with a smile that “I hate technology,” showed herself as an award-winning dancer, an avocation she said she wanted to combine with a medical career; the ability to “show colleges what you can do,” rather than “just show people a piece of paper on yourself,” made tech “worth the struggle.”

Susan Olsen, a teacher, spoke of engaging a full range of students in the project, students both struggling and already succeeding academically. Mr. Maloney wowed the audience by showing his class website for AP Physics, which he had redone for the project using “the free tools the kids are using.” He showed us how he could communicate ways of solving physics equations online to students; he also was making and posting videos online that communicate to other teachers how to create physics equipment for a low cost. He also participated in blog community discussions sharing ahas with physics teachers across the world. “I didn’t collect one piece of paper this year from my students except for tests,” he said, and students were online regularly commenting on each others’ assignments.

David showed a video of his persistent skateboarding, and his sketches of animals and plants. His teacher Michelle Li pointed out that ePortfolios could personalize learning more effectively with students like David, and, that these could be accessed “any time, from anywhere.” (She showed us how her website also linked to the Somerville Public Schools calendar and daily bulletin, and to X2, the student information system, so students could check up on their grades.) Her “vision”: to have each student make an eportfolio that she could link to her own class website. This would allow her, her students, and even her students’ parents to have “meaningful conversations with kids.” (Another student, Sonam, has already been presenting his ePortfolio efforts to her class, and now lots of kids want to make ePortfolios!)

Mr. Petriv, a computer hardware teacher, had made the leap from his typical “shrink-wrapped programs with a manual” to experimenting with various free software for the project. He showed us pictures of the lilies he loved, the beetles that he hated, and his expertise in home repair, then talked about the potential for ePortfolios to show both the “filing cabinet” of all student work and the “best work” for graduation or career.

Sonam, an avid video game enthusiast, showed how he learned computer programming through an application called Scratch and created his own game.

Vanessa showed a physics video and online diary. “I lost my (paper) portfolio folder in sophomore year and nobody ever said anything,” Vanessa added, to laughs from the group. “If I had gotten this when I was a freshman, I could have linked to it on the common college application. . . .We are the new tech generation. Kids will lie to you and tell you they can’t make a website, but they can; we all have Facebook!”

Kamilla closed the evening with a photo of a chemistry class in Brazil, her paper drawings of flowers, her experiments with hair dyes, her hand-designed dresses from Brazil, and her dreams of being a chemical engineer.

The whole teacher, the whole student. The library glowed with pictures of lilies, of skateboards, next to drawings of physics and algebra equations and Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution plans; photos of hand-designed dresses posted next to dreams of becoming chemical engineers, next to poems written in hammocks. Students and teachers themselves, up in front, flowed back and forth between describing all parts of themselves, with equal interest; a love of chemistry and blue hair. When, in school, do we get to communicate who we actually are and what we can actually do? And what might happen if we did this all the time?

'''[[http://oneville.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ePortfolioFinalPresentationProgramMarch2011.pdfePortfolio Final Presentation]] '''

2012-07-20T03:56:08Z

Micapollock: /* Communication we hoped to improve */

==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?)

We’ve supported Somerville technologists in collaboration with a community organization, the Haitian Coalition, to work on low-cost improvements to Somerville's computer infrastructure (refurbishing computers, teaching multi-age classes in a housing project) so that more people can access basic technology and gain basic technology skills to make such communications even possible.

Typically, the computer lab at Somerville's Clarendon Hill Apartments, a housing project in West Somerville, has half a dozen kids in it, playing flash games or using applications such as Second Life or Facebook, and an adult present in the lab to monitor usage. The computer lab consists of thirteen PCs running either Windows 2000 or Windows XP. When Somerville High School graduate Caroline Meeks started working with the program in 2010-11, many of the computers were unusable due to the presence of viruses and malware, or due to people changing the passwords. Caroline wanted to provide a constructive alternative to run-of-the-mill computer games and clean up the computers so that the residents, particularly the youth, could take advantage of this opportunity; another goal was refurbishing discarded computers for new users. OneVille helped staff her work that year as one important effort at "computer infrastructure" improvement.

==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?
-------

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

'''Our Custom Etoys Stick

In the fall of 2009, Caroline Meeks was working on testing “Sugar on a Stick” in an Allston elementary school in collaboration with Sugar Labs, a spinoff of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organization. Seth Woodworth, who was working on the Oneville project, was a former employee of One Laptop per Child. Caroline lives near Somerville and attended Somerville High School. Thus, there was interest in doing a pilot in Somerville.

Seth brought Caroline, Professor Mica Pollock, and Franklin Dalembert, the Executive Director of the Haitian Coalition of Somerville, together for a meeting at the Somerville Housing Authority’s facility at Mystic. (The Haitian Coalition [[haitian-coalition.org]] is a community-based organization located in the Clarendon Hill Apartments, and it promotes Haitian culture and helps members of the Haitian community gain access to services and programs such as legal aid, social services, voter registration and small business training.) The group decided to pilot in the CHA computer lab in partnership with the Haitian Coalition of Somerville. The team was later joined by Derek Radfern, a student taking a gap year between graduating high school and entering Olin College, a local engineering college.

The original goal of the project was to give every child in CHA a USB stick with a bootable version of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, and filled with educational programs. The initial software selection was based on the work of Open1to1, a Maine based educational project. See [[open1to1.org/index.php/Main_Page]] for further information. However, a number of technical issues were encountered that hindered, and ultimately prevented, implementation. These issues included:

*Slow boot time on CHA machines - more optimization required for the image to be a viable option
*The Persistence software did not work when the stick was created on Windows, regardless of the tool used

However, the Haitian Coalition's relationship with Waveplace [[waveplace.org]], an organization that is piloting the use of OLPC laptops in a number of schools, introduced the team to Etoys, a childrens’ programming environment where kids can both draw and program. Etoys has been used for over 10 years in the US and other countries; see [[squeakland.org]]. Another feature of the software is its instructional capability: Etoys allows users to create curricula to teach kids how to use to software for increasingly advanced purposes. Waveplace’s goal is to create a full set of curricula; currently they are working on subjects that include science, mathematics, and health.

One of the main advantages of Etoys over similar projects such as Scratch and Turtle Art is that it has a “to-go” version already built that runs from a USB stick without needing to install anything on a computer. This way, each child can have his or her own stick that holds Etoys, a particular set of curricula, and the child’s own projects.

We wanted to create a stick that easily runs on different hardware platforms (Windows, Macintosh, and Linux) and that automatically backs up the students’ work to the internet without student intervention. After doing this, we started classes with children who dropped into the CHA Computer center, teaching them to use Etoys to create art, games, and stories, and testing some of the Waveplace curricula.

Our custom Etoys stick runs off of a Java executable archive that serves three main purposes: to identify the operating system currently in use; to execute the proper version of Etoys based on the OS; and to execute Dropbox if that OS is Windows. A copy of the Java source code can be found here: http://pastebin.com/W4c7s0wp After the jar file runs, Dropbox will run transparently in the background if on Windows, and Etoys will open after a short delay, depending on the speed of the system. Also included on our sticks are the project files for Waveplace science and geometry curriculum. They can be accessed by using the “open” button.

'''Refurbishing Donated Machines

The Haitian Coalition has 19 donated computers (along with a number of monitors and other peripherals) that have been wiped clean. All are Dell Optiplex GX240 models, with varying amounts of RAM and CPU power (averaging 512MB and 1.5GHz respectively). We decided to install the Ubuntu distribution of Linux on them for reasons of cost, performance, and open-source availability.

We’ve loaded many educational programs and useful tools onto the systems. The full list is included in the link below, but the highlights are: KDEdu (large suite of educational programs), GIMP, Chromium, Dropbox, Scratch, Audacity, and Etoys. We also installed the Netbook Launcher on them, courtesy of Martin Owens, as an easier to use alternate interface.

There are plenty of keyboards, mice, and power cords lying around; monitors are in shorter supply.

Steps to prepare CHA computers and list of software can be found here: http://goo.gl/5QPUn

As of this writing, ten computers have been imaged, of which six have been installed in homes at CHA. Finding families to donate computers to was mostly done through word of mouth and signage around the apartment complexes. The kids, who were in general more enthusiastic than their parents about the prospect of having a computer, were our main avenue for spreading the word - once one of them knew, all of them knew, as well as their parents. Lince and Franklin also reached out to specific residents who would benefit from a donated computer.

Installing the computers in the homes was a relatively simple process. An appointment was made for the installation, and we brought all the equipment over to their house (computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, 2 power cables) at that time. One challenge was finding enough outlets to host the power plugs - most of the families didn’t have power strips. It might be good to have surge protectors to donate to the families as well.

After everything was installed, we spent some time going over how to log in (password is “password”), how to navigate the menus or Netbook Launcher as appropriate, how to use basic applications, how to open the internet (if they had internet or were expecting to get it soon), etc. We also showed them how to find their files and how to open a USB stick. When there was interest in learning more, we went over more advanced settings and features of Ubuntu (changing screensaver, password, etc) and went further into word processing. Then we answered any questions they had and let them explore on their own.

In addition to preparing the donated computers, we’ve brought the systems already in place within the CHA lab up to date. The administrator accounts had been locked with the password long forgotten, so we reset the passwords to “Somerville” and proceeded to clean up the machines. This process included removing the software that posed security risks or performance problems (downloaded freeware games, free smilies, and viruses posing as free smilies) and locking the desktop background to prevent kids changing it to offensive images. The systems also needed plugin updates - notably Java. Finally, we plugged the security loophole that allowed us to change the admin password in the first place. These systems are now secure.

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

We've had a total of 17 kids take part in our classes at CHA over the course of eight training sessions. Of those, roughly half came for only one or two classes; the rest still come intermitently. Generally we can expect four or five kids on any given day, with a few more who are really only interested in playing flash games. We've also run two classes at Parts and Crafts during their vacation camp, where we got around ten students.

The kids are always excited about learning new and cool things to do in Etoys, whether it's animating a character's mouth or making moving eyes that track your cursor. The main project we ran at CHA was on storytelling. (http://goo.gl/VjclP) Choose-your-own-Adventure books (http://goo.gl/dEUUK) and action-based “cops and robbers” style games (http://goo.gl/AHDcr) have also gone over well. The kids did show a tendency to use a lot of violence in their books, but we ascribed it to the fact that kids will be kids and that there’s not much to be done about it. We have video and photo releases from two CHA students so far (Nana and Dessources), plus the students from Parts and Crafts. Examples of their work can be found in the shared Dropbox folder.

'''Replicable Pieces - Standalone pieces that someone else could take and use.

*Etoys stick with backup.- Audience is teachers and after-school programs. How to make it, use it, and recreate it. - http://goo.gl/L4FIF

*Choose your own adventure Etoys book - Audience is people who are using Etoys and want to make a choose your own adventure book. - http://goo.gl/k00Ga

*Translatable books - Audience is bilingual people who want to make a book that can switch between two languages. - http://goo.gl/RJ8vf

*Etoys Training curriculum - Audience is people who want to train adults in using Etoys with kids or for curriculum. - http://goo.gl/Fet1b

===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!
-------

===Technological how-tos===

'''System Requirements and Restrictions

*Backup is currently only working on Windows XP and up. (Since one of the computers in the CHA lab runs Windows 2000, we know it’s not compatible with that version of Windows.)
*Systems must have Java installed in order for users to start Etoys. It’s still possible to browse to the appropriate executable manually, but this isn’t something most people will know how to do.
*The version of Java must be reasonably current, which can present a problem on systems without access to the internet. For reference, the current version of Java is JRE 6 update 25; execution failed on an older system, which turned out to be running JRE 2.
*It is impossible to make the sticks autorun eToys (that is, without making kids execute anything), as this functionality has been removed in the major operating systems for security reasons.

'''Backup

Our current backup solution involves using an application called DropboxPortableAHK, which was written in AutoHotKey. The app is on the back end of the interface, as it is automatically executed when Etoys runs. The user never has to interact with it except when an update is available for the software.

DropboxPortableAHK is basically a wrapper for the normal Dropbox installer. The difference is that it modifies some of the steps in the install process to match your preferences - in this case, making the Dropbox folder reside on a USB drive. During setup, you can mark the Etoys data folder as the Dropbox folder so that all project files are automagically backed up:

[[Image:dropboxahk.png]]

Whenever a student runs Etoys on a Windows computer (XP or higher) with internet access, their project files are synced with the cloud; therefore if a stick is lost or damaged, the project files can easily be accessed and restored since the usernames and passwords for the sticks are on record. In addition, this part of the stick does have an auto-update ability to ensure that the kids have the latest version of the backup software.

Instructions for setting up Dropbox on the sticks can be found here: http://goo.gl/L4FIF

'''Ideas for future tech development

Finding a backup solution for Mac and Linux, as DropboxPortableAHK only works on Windows.
Possibly creating a Chrome extension to house all the data, as was discussed in February.
Using githooks or similar technology to allow the sticks to pull the newest version of the stick from github servers automagically.
Continuing to image the remaining computers at CHA.

The OneVille Project

2012-07-20T03:53:02Z

Micapollock: /* What is the OneVille Project? */

The OneVille Project

2012-07-20T03:52:43Z

Micapollock: /* What is the OneVille Project? */

Overview and key findings: Data dashboards

2012-07-20T03:51:12Z

Micapollock:

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, and Josh Wairi for the dashboard project, with initial dashboard development by Somerville technologist Seth Woodworth and next development for piloting by David Lord of San Diego

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, shouldn't the people who need to see basic data in order to serve young people be able to see it immediately?

Unfortunately, access to the data tools needed to provide this info (and, knowledge on how to use those tools) varies widely among districts. Some districts and schools that can afford it are investing in sophisticated data systems made by private companies; sometimes those companies fold, leaving districts in the lurch again. Resource-strapped districts and schools often can’t afford to buy such tools. And when districts do have online data display tools, educators or parents often aren't trained on how to use them -- and most typically haven't participated in maximizing those tools' design. So, even in districts that have created expensive data display systems, often the problem is getting people to actually use the system to support students better. So, we wanted to try to design tools to community specifications.

In Somerville, teachers and administrators said they couldn’t easily view or sort patterns in student data because that data was buried in different “fields” in the student information system (SIS), which Somerville couldn’t afford to replace or fundamentally upgrade.

We - local academic researchers and a teacher co-researcher (Wairi), and several local technologists - worked with one classroom's families, related afterschool providers, and two principals (with the ongoing advice of central administration in the Somerville School District), to try to meet the need for a user-friendly, affordable way to view and examine 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 let family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers quickly view and sort data they need to see. We created an “admin view” for principals, which shows Student Information System data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows a teacher such 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 data profile.

In the dashboard project, we thought a lot about who needs to see which data on children. The quantitative measures or summary data about young people kept in a typical "Student Information System" (e.g., students' absences; their credits; a report card) never show "the whole child": '''[[Eportfolio|eportfolios]]''' can help with that. But such basic measures still provide information crucial to the process of tracking student progress. And they do tend to predict things like graduating or “dropping out.”

We undertook a collaborative design process that asked different district and school administrators, parents, and afterschool providers to look at the developing tools and comment on that very question -- which data available in Somerville's Student Information System was most important to view on demand? We held regular meetings with teacher and co-designer Josh Wairi, did repeated interviews with principals and service providers, and met with parents and service providers in evening review meetings. Somerville technologist Seth Woodworth, with Somerville technologist Evan Burchard (now of San Francisco), created the initial core of three views. Seth was working on the dashboard while also helping to project manage on other efforts, and after the initial technological development went slower than we all hoped and budgeted for, delaying a fall pilot, David Lord, a fabulous and generous young developer in San Diego, developed the views to near professional-level completion for us for free. At the end of this page, you'll find the code for all three views. This code, and so, the dashboard tools themselves, are freely available for anyone to complete and adapt.

While just implementing a store-bought tool could have been faster, -- and while the future of open source, free dashboard design for schools likely lies in large, experienced tech development groups tackling such projects for pay -- we felt that it was crucial to collaborate with the Somerville community to design the tools. In that process, some issues about data display became clear to us:

'''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, some stakeholders told stories of a student who received an unexpectedly poor grade, with the parent, the homeroom teacher, or the administrator surprised by the news. Administrators also described how seeing patterns faster could support timely interventions. For example, Principal Vadhera talked about needing to quickly sort data by "students with IEPs," to ensure these students had MCAS accommodations on testing day.

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

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, or sort quickly for patterns that are displayed in one view.

We've been learning that many schools as well as afterschool programs do not have easy tools for quickly displaying (or sorting) basic information for multiple partners to view at once, all in one place and in simple form. 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 display of that data for parents and students, teachers, afterschool providers, and administrators. To see patterns using the existing Student Information System, administrators often sent many 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. Staff said they wasted time preparing for such meetings by trying to analyze patterns by hand. Finally, parents could access the student information system with a password, but many parents said they didn't know about this feature, and some had a hard time understanding the way the system displayed data (which was also only in English). So, we designed the "dashboards" to sit on top of the student information system and "pull" data out for easy viewing (and for two of the views, sorting), all in one place. Our goal was to translate the interface on the "individual view," for parents.

The dashboards are also designed to be automatically updated, with the last iteration anticipating updates through routine emails of data sets from the district's IT staff. For full adoption, a small amount of programming could afford further automatic upload.

'''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; the tools would then require tens of thousands of dollars for annual upkeep. We figured that with our Ford grant, we could work with a local technologist to develop an open source tool to educators' and parents' specifications, free to the district. Also, a "free" tool meant a sharable tool. Any next district or developer could then have the software for their own use.

It's true that open source development produces a free tool, meaning that districts wouldn't have to buy the product itself or renew the license to use it. But those using open source tools still have to pay for services, for upkeep and troubleshooting the tool. Still, we reasoned, this can be a fraction of the cost of storebought tools. 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 that pay lots of money for store-bought, "off the shelf" dashboard tools also often can find them unused by the community -- or, companies often go out of business, leaving districts searching for tech support or next products. For all these reasons, we wanted to try to build something "free" to community specifications instead.

In all this, we've encountered the core problem with designing and creating tools from scratch, to community specifications and on a fixed budget: relying on part-time individual technologists rather than large companies. While our local technologist worked to produce tools to community specifications, he went far slower than budgeted for, leaving us unable to pilot the dashboard. We were fortunate to find another technologist, David Lord, based in San Diego, to bring the admin and teacher dashboard views to near completion for free.

We note that professional-level local technologists on larger budgets might provide more immediately ready open source infrastructure for schools and districts. So can technologists with products closer to final development. Our other "from scratch" tool experience went better: after the same local young technologist struggled to complete our prototype Parent Connector Network hotline, a professional-level hotline was finally prototyped rapidly by Leo Burd, a new colleague at MIT's Center for Civic Media who specialized in such open source (VOIPDrupal) tools for voice-messaging and was inspired enough by the Parent Connector project that he did it for free. See the '''[[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Parent Connector Network]]''' project!

'''The administrator view'''

We based the administrator and teacher views on an Excel spreadsheet model created by Healey dad Greg Nadeau, which staff were trying to update annually by hand in 2009. In partnership with Principals Jason DeFalco and Purnima Vahdera and teacher Josh Wairi during the 2010-2011 school year, we updated fields on these views to teachers' and administrators' specifications. Most important, we made all data fields 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 also 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, blurred data to maintain confidentiality:

[[Image:Admin Dash 2012-01-25.jpg|1000x500px|Admin Dash 2012-01-25.jpg]]

'''The individual view'''

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

Importantly to the OneVille Project, this "individual view" also was designed to give parents 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 could continue over email or in person. The current Student Information System only allowed viewers to view data, not comment on it. So, unless the people in a student's life were sitting together looking at the SIS, data display also couldn't easily launch a conversation between those people.

Our screens also have a minimum of extra words, to enable translation for piloting. Here is the individual view’s final page, where viewers can review and submit their comments, which go to the teacher's email inbox:

[[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 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. See the '''[[Expanded story: Data dashboards|Expanded story]] '''for more:

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

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It seems crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display -- and, to be able to sort that data to check for patterns.

'''¡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===

Our goal in 2011-12 was to pilot and tweak these three tools with teacher Josh Wairi, Principal Purnima Vadhera, and Wairi's families/students and their afterschool providers. Our fabulous but part-time and pro bono developer in San Diego finished the tools to near-pilot readiness by late Spring 2012, but fell about 60 development hours from pilot-readiness on the admin and teacher views (and roughly 300 hours from pilot-readiness on the individual view). Remaining work: to finish tweaking the final programming "tubes" linking the dashboard to Somerville's Student Information System so that data could be displayed 100% glitch-free.

We're disappointed to not yet pilot these tools, because throughout the design process, we’ve gotten feedback from parents, teachers, and administrators about all three dashboards’ potential value. Staff emphasized the ways the tools could support information-sharing and conversation in meetings, one-to-one interactions, and email-based conversations about the data. And 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!"

In a recent planning meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the value of the three integrated dashboard views, in contrast to the old system of hand-compiling data from different locations: “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.”

Finally, both Principal Vadhera and teacher Josh Wairi suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s basic situation and design more targeted interventions. If using the individual view, educators could then record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments then archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email.

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 before any immediate use by the community partner. The reality is that part-time technologists creating these products to community specifications, working alone on our limited budget, couldn't quite create a financially sustainable tech solution for Somerville's data viewing. We might lose confidence in local open source development, but we've learned the hard way that some developers move faster than others and that the basic need is sufficiently budgeted development hours. And, the reality is that a tool for easily seeing data "all in one place" otherwise may not exist in Somerville for some time due to the expense of "off the shelf" tools. We're optimistic that next developers 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 '''Technological how-tos''', below.

'''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 of the "individual view," because we'd face the same challenges 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 the individual view could be accessed by smartphone). 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 we could not pilot the dashboard in the 2011-2012 year, we have been exploring local leads to create a model of basic computer and email training run by parents, youth, or local students, for parents who need this support.''' See the [[Summary: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network|Parent Connector]] project. Our goal was to combine email training with training parents to use the "Individual View" dashboard. Another hook could be training parents to join the school's newly schoolwide, parent-created listserv. '''The school has already established a computer in the school's new Parent Welcome Center, available for parent use at prescheduled times, and there's daily availability of the computer lab in the local housing development.

Even though the tools weren't finished for piloting glitch-free in Somerville in the end, the open source code (below) now exists to display data for easy viewing and sorting. And because the tools are open source, they can support next efforts at creating free educational data displays for districts or programs too often spending fortunes on storebought tools. Our entire Ford grant could have been eaten up in buying Somerville a tool off the shelf. Instead, we have added a partial 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 free tools – Google sites or wikispaces for [[Eportfolio]] software, or Google Voice and low-cost pre-existing text messaging for the [[Summary: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|texting]] project – seeded the most longstanding local change most quickly and actually got people communicating.

===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:
:➢ To support young people, what “data” should show up on any data display, and why?
:➢ How does your school make data on students visible to school administrators, classroom teachers, and afterschool providers? And how about parents? Which necessary data is readily available, and which isn't?
:➢ 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 to test which works for what?
:➢ What data isn’t found in any “student information system” but should still be known? By whom?
:➢ 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)

Since the individual view is not quite complete, and since we want to fully communicate our vision to future developers, here are links to the complete information for this tool:

[https://oneville-report-card.heroku.com Here is the link] to the application as it currently stands.

Here is the login info:
email: mary@oneville.org

password: marypassword

and [[To-dos for individual view|here is a link]] to the list of remaining to-dos that would optimize its usefulness.

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

2012-07-20T03:50:52Z

Micapollock:

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2012-07-20T03:50:33Z

Micapollock:

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, and Josh Wairi for the dashboard project, with initial dashboard development by local technologist Seth Woodworth and next development for piloting by David Lord of San Diego.

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!

'''Starting off, and developing our goals:

From start to finish, the dashboard project was a saga of not fully understanding the extent of work involved in creating tech tools from scratch. Our first technologist early in the project argued convincingly that simple, clear "dashboards" were key to including ordinary people in data discussions and, quite possible to create from scratch, so the non-technologists in the group jumped headfirst into a tech development area we knew nothing about. In fact, as we began the OneVille Project back in summer 2009, we actually proposed to create a “dashboard” displaying basic data linking multiple 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 student and family (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 a child?). 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. Now that we understand more about tech tool development, it's likely that this multiple database project would have been very difficult to get close to completing with part-time, individual developers.

We also moved away from any effort at 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 do R & D supporting 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.

'''¡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.

Throughout, we also became convinced that a dashboard shouldn’t just show data more clearly – 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. So, we designed the individual view to allow users to upload commentary, and future iterations of the admin and teacher views would also allow for qualitative notes.

In talking to families, teachers, and other service providers with our next technologist, Seth, 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!

We ultimately found the project of building a finished data dashboard for actual ongoing use by a district's educators and families to be beyond the capacity and resources of our single-technologist staffing and two-year funding plan. The future of open source dashboard development for districts and communities may well lie in large, more experienced developer teams constructing and then troubleshooting free dashboards together for pay. (If we had focused our Ford grant fully on the dashboard's development, we perhaps could have supported such a team.) But having almost finished usable dashboard products relying on two individual, part-time young developers in sequence, we consider our work to be evidence that the goal is worth pursuing and can be attained -- with the resources described in our final section below, "Development process and future prospects." In the following sections, "The Community's need for the work," "Design process," and "Feedback on the design," we describe the tool as it was designed to work.

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

Our work was shaped by a number of insights about necessary communications about "basic data" with students and their families, as individuals and across classrooms or schools.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It seems crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display -- and to be able to sort that data to check for patterns.

Our dashboard was intended to sit “above” Aspen X2, the district’s current database, and displays its data in a more easily readable format for more people. (The dashboards are also designed to be automatically updated, currently through emails of data from the district's IT staff. For full adoption, a small amount of programming could afford further automatic upload.)

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]]

Once some of these users would get to X2, they found the format of the data there hard to understand. First of all, information isn't translated for non-English speakers. In addition and particularly importantly, when a teacher logged into X2, 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 actually have calculations like test score growth: they just showed one score, then the next. Seth first spent lots of time building “tubes” to make the dashboard automatically calculate this growth; rebuilding and then tweaking these "tubes" for final 100% accuracy was David's last task.

From an administrator’s perspective, it was also 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 said they 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 (great!) 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.

As our dashboard conversations with Principals DeFalco and Vadhera showed us, part of this problem was that some important data fields were not kept in X2 at all yet (e.g., afterschool enrollment and attendance, specific in-school tutoring services students received, and some disciplinary records). We ultimately had to leave out some data folks wanted on the dashboards because it was not yet kept in X2. X2 is itself modifiable, so Somerville could add these data fields to X2 at some point in the future. But in addition, while some in-school afterschool providers have direct access to X2, many running afterschool programs elsewhere in the community didn't, meaning they had trouble knowing basic information like whether students who were coming to afterschool were going to school. When we began the project, even some in-school afterschool 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 overall, 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.

Finally, 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.” While the District's new report card (which came out on paper, printed from an online database) 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.

=='''Design 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 worked on making the dashboard version of this view “live” by connecting it initially 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 at the principal's request, assisted by colleague Al Willis, the original proponent of the OneVille dashboard project (who also ended up later helping to realize the [[eportfolio]] project). 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 disciplinary referrals and 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 latest version of the admin and teacher views (below), Mica, Seth (our project technologist, who had stepped up to tackle dashboard development in 2010 while assisting with many other OneVille projects), 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 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:Admin Dash 2012-01-25.jpg|1000x500px|Admin Dash 2012-01-25.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.

We had also been inspired by the New Visions for New Schools project, which has reported 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 the report card's qualitative assessments and also, allow and encourage 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 the 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 individual view, 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 boxes 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 went was to be an important piece of the pilot.)

To enable easy translation for piloting, the view has hardly any words added onto the language already in the report card. As we worked to import the district’s translations of the basic report card rubrics, we also considered having the dashboard explicitly encourage 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 completed views, we would have offered a translated version of the basic individual view in Spanish, Portuguese, and perhaps Haitian Creole.

Overall, knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people used the tools would 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 on the design==

'''¡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 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 would 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, or support room teachers. She said 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.

Principal Vadhera explained that on the admin view, she was interested in “anything that shows a gap.” Similarly, sorting attendance data by grade, for example, would save hours for staff who had typically printed the daily reports and then spent hours across “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 she often spent “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers to ensure that everyone’s accommodation needs had been met. Our tool could 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.”

Principal Vadhera and Josh Wairi both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design and discuss targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that would 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 was 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, reviewers noted that another relevant team that could use the dashboard to look at data together (even remotely) was 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.

==Development process and future prospects==

We planned to pilot our three “views” at the Healey in fall 2011 and report out what we learned. As Principal Vadhera explained about our planned incremental approach to implementation, “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!”

While we asked for our local technologist to be done with development for piloting by September 1, the tools were still in development by mid-October, 2011, after the Ford funding had ended. The prototypes of the administrative and teacher views appeared to be nearly complete pending new data from the District (which required building final "tubes" to the district's student information system), and the word on the individual view was that it was "nearly complete." These delays prompted a district administrator to reconsider the pilot, even as Josh, families, students, and supporting teachers were still ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers. By that time, our budget for development was spent down, and we were fortunate to find another technologist, David Lord, based in San Diego, to bring the admin and teacher dashboard views to near completion for free.

David spent 200 hours rebuilding the three dashboard views our original developer had worked on in order to clean them up, i.e., to make them easier to combine and debug/modify in the future, and develop them closer to completion. The goal was to create work and code that other developers elsewhere could also ultimately use for new projects (one of OneVille's ultimate goals with tech development). He also "cleaned up" work-arounds in the original code and designed both the admin and teacher views to be compatible with an eventual individual view.

The biggest challenge was simply the scale of the work. Listening to local community members' desires to see a variety of data types quickly and clearly in one place, we had expanded any original vision of a single, hyper-simple dashboard to three more complex views; after the original budget ran out, the project still required several months of full-time development work, rather than a few days or week, and David did the work pro bono after his actual job ended. A secondary challenge was that both the prior OneVille PI, Mica, and the current dashboard project manager, Jedd, understood education data but had no significant experience with technology project management -- i.e., understanding the scope of developing tools from scratch. The full series of technologists working on the project, in turn, didn't know details about education data -- the format of student data in the district's system, information necessary in order to finish the "tubes" to the system 100% accurately. All this too had to be learned from scratch across our team. Features that a non-technologist would consider trivial, such as creating logins for different teachers, ended up requiring substantial reworking of the code. Similarly, while we knew what subset of student data people wanted to see, we learned that the district's data set had many more kinds of information to track and parse in order to make sure that no unknown values caused errors in the dashboard display.

David estimates that 60-100 hours of work remain to finish building the "tubes" from Somerville's data system to our teacher and admin dashboard views, for 100% accuracy in the data display. Given that the teacher and admin views are now ready to integrate with an individual view, David estimates that finishing the individual view, which is not as far along, would take 220-330 hours. Adapting the tool to another district's student information system (if not X2) would involve rebuilding most of the tubes, and some elements of the display, so it would likely take closer to 480 hours.

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 before any immediate use by the community partner; it also means that the developer's work assignments can shift according to community desires. The reality is that part-time technologists creating these products to community specifications, working alone on our limited budget, couldn't quite create a financially sustainable tech solution for Somerville's data viewing. We might lose confidence in local open source development, but we've learned the hard way that the basic need is sufficiently budgeted and planned development hours; the future of such open source dashboard development may lie in large, experienced teams designing and troubleshooting such tools together. And, while building "from scratch" is not truly free, it may remain far less expensive than storebought tools, and so more attainable with district budgets: the reality is that a tool for easily seeing data "all in one place" otherwise may not exist in Somerville for some time due to the expense of "off the shelf" tools. We're optimistic that next developers 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 '''Technological How-Tos''' in '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] ''').

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. While our "product" in the end is code instead of a finished piloted product, we believe that the community design process we began will serve next design efforts for "data display."

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.

Expanded story: Data dashboards

2012-07-20T03:49:41Z

Micapollock:

''Written by Mica Pollock, Jedd Cohen, and Josh Wairi for the dashboard project, with initial dashboard development by local technologist Seth Woodworth and final development for piloting by David Lord of San Diego.

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!

'''Starting off, and developing our goals:

From start to finish, the dashboard project was a saga of not fully understanding the extent of work involved in creating tech tools from scratch. Our first technologist early in the project argued convincingly that simple, clear "dashboards" were key to including ordinary people in data discussions and, quite possible to create from scratch, so the non-technologists in the group jumped headfirst into a tech development area we knew nothing about. In fact, as we began the OneVille Project back in summer 2009, we actually proposed to create a “dashboard” displaying basic data linking multiple 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 student and family (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 a child?). 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. Now that we understand more about tech tool development, it's likely that this multiple database project would have been very difficult to get close to completing with part-time, individual developers.

We also moved away from any effort at 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 do R & D supporting 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.

'''¡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.

Throughout, we also became convinced that a dashboard shouldn’t just show data more clearly – 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. So, we designed the individual view to allow users to upload commentary, and future iterations of the admin and teacher views would also allow for qualitative notes.

In talking to families, teachers, and other service providers with our next technologist, Seth, 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!

We ultimately found the project of building a finished data dashboard for actual ongoing use by a district's educators and families to be beyond the capacity and resources of our single-technologist staffing and two-year funding plan. The future of open source dashboard development for districts and communities may well lie in large, more experienced developer teams constructing and then troubleshooting free dashboards together for pay. (If we had focused our Ford grant fully on the dashboard's development, we perhaps could have supported such a team.) But having almost finished usable dashboard products relying on two individual, part-time young developers in sequence, we consider our work to be evidence that the goal is worth pursuing and can be attained -- with the resources described in our final section below, "Development process and future prospects." In the following sections, "The Community's need for the work," "Design process," and "Feedback on the design," we describe the tool as it was designed to work.

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

Our work was shaped by a number of insights about necessary communications about "basic data" with students and their families, as individuals and across classrooms or schools.

'''¡Aha! One-Stop Shopping: It seems crucial to be able to see different kinds of student data at the same time, in a single display -- and to be able to sort that data to check for patterns.

Our dashboard was intended to sit “above” Aspen X2, the district’s current database, and displays its data in a more easily readable format for more people. (The dashboards are also designed to be automatically updated, currently through emails of data from the district's IT staff. For full adoption, a small amount of programming could afford further automatic upload.)

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]]

Once some of these users would get to X2, they found the format of the data there hard to understand. First of all, information isn't translated for non-English speakers. In addition and particularly importantly, when a teacher logged into X2, 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 actually have calculations like test score growth: they just showed one score, then the next. Seth first spent lots of time building “tubes” to make the dashboard automatically calculate this growth; rebuilding and then tweaking these "tubes" for final 100% accuracy was David's last task.

From an administrator’s perspective, it was also 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 said they 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 (great!) 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.

As our dashboard conversations with Principals DeFalco and Vadhera showed us, part of this problem was that some important data fields were not kept in X2 at all yet (e.g., afterschool enrollment and attendance, specific in-school tutoring services students received, and some disciplinary records). We ultimately had to leave out some data folks wanted on the dashboards because it was not yet kept in X2. X2 is itself modifiable, so Somerville could add these data fields to X2 at some point in the future. But in addition, while some in-school afterschool providers have direct access to X2, many running afterschool programs elsewhere in the community didn't, meaning they had trouble knowing basic information like whether students who were coming to afterschool were going to school. When we began the project, even some in-school afterschool 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 overall, 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.

Finally, 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.” While the District's new report card (which came out on paper, printed from an online database) 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.

=='''Design 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 worked on making the dashboard version of this view “live” by connecting it initially 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 at the principal's request, assisted by colleague Al Willis, the original proponent of the OneVille dashboard project (who also ended up later helping to realize the [[eportfolio]] project). 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 disciplinary referrals and 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 latest version of the admin and teacher views (below), Mica, Seth (our project technologist, who had stepped up to tackle dashboard development in 2010 while assisting with many other OneVille projects), 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 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:Admin Dash 2012-01-25.jpg|1000x500px|Admin Dash 2012-01-25.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.

We had also been inspired by the New Visions for New Schools project, which has reported 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 the report card's qualitative assessments and also, allow and encourage 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 the 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 individual view, 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 boxes 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 went was to be an important piece of the pilot.)

To enable easy translation for piloting, the view has hardly any words added onto the language already in the report card. As we worked to import the district’s translations of the basic report card rubrics, we also considered having the dashboard explicitly encourage 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 completed views, we would have offered a translated version of the basic individual view in Spanish, Portuguese, and perhaps Haitian Creole.

Overall, knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people used the tools would 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 on the design==

'''¡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 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 would 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, or support room teachers. She said 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.

Principal Vadhera explained that on the admin view, she was interested in “anything that shows a gap.” Similarly, sorting attendance data by grade, for example, would save hours for staff who had typically printed the daily reports and then spent hours across “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 she often spent “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers to ensure that everyone’s accommodation needs had been met. Our tool could 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.”

Principal Vadhera and Josh Wairi both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design and discuss targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that would 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 was 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, reviewers noted that another relevant team that could use the dashboard to look at data together (even remotely) was 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.

==Development process and future prospects==

We planned to pilot our three “views” at the Healey in fall 2011 and report out what we learned. As Principal Vadhera explained about our planned incremental approach to implementation, “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!”

While we asked for our local technologist to be done with development for piloting by September 1, the tools were still in development by mid-October, 2011, after the Ford funding had ended. The prototypes of the administrative and teacher views appeared to be nearly complete pending new data from the District (which required building final "tubes" to the district's student information system), and the word on the individual view was that it was "nearly complete." These delays prompted a district administrator to reconsider the pilot, even as Josh, families, students, and supporting teachers were still ready to test the dashboard in fall 2011, as were their principal and local afterschool providers. By that time, our budget for development was spent down, and we were fortunate to find another technologist, David Lord, based in San Diego, to bring the admin and teacher dashboard views to near completion for free.

David spent 200 hours rebuilding the three dashboard views our original developer had worked on in order to clean them up, i.e., to make them easier to combine and debug/modify in the future, and develop them closer to completion. The goal was to create work and code that other developers elsewhere could also ultimately use for new projects (one of OneVille's ultimate goals with tech development). He also "cleaned up" work-arounds in the original code and designed both the admin and teacher views to be compatible with an eventual individual view.

The biggest challenge was simply the scale of the work. Listening to local community members' desires to see a variety of data types quickly and clearly in one place, we had expanded any original vision of a single, hyper-simple dashboard to three more complex views; after the original budget ran out, the project still required several months of full-time development work, rather than a few days or week, and David did the work pro bono after his actual job ended. A secondary challenge was that both the prior OneVille PI, Mica, and the current dashboard project manager, Jedd, understood education data but had no significant experience with technology project management -- i.e., understanding the scope of developing tools from scratch. The full series of technologists working on the project, in turn, didn't know details about education data -- the format of student data in the district's system, information necessary in order to finish the "tubes" to the system 100% accurately. All this too had to be learned from scratch across our team. Features that a non-technologist would consider trivial, such as creating logins for different teachers, ended up requiring substantial reworking of the code. Similarly, while we knew what subset of student data people wanted to see, we learned that the district's data set had many more kinds of information to track and parse in order to make sure that no unknown values caused errors in the dashboard display.

David estimates that 60-100 hours of work remain to finish building the "tubes" from Somerville's data system to our teacher and admin dashboard views, for 100% accuracy in the data display. Given that the teacher and admin views are now ready to integrate with an individual view, David estimates that finishing the individual view, which is not as far along, would take 220-330 hours. Adapting the tool to another district's student information system (if not X2) would involve rebuilding most of the tubes, and some elements of the display, so it would likely take closer to 480 hours.

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 before any immediate use by the community partner; it also means that the developer's work assignments can shift according to community desires. The reality is that part-time technologists creating these products to community specifications, working alone on our limited budget, couldn't quite create a financially sustainable tech solution for Somerville's data viewing. We might lose confidence in local open source development, but we've learned the hard way that the basic need is sufficiently budgeted and planned development hours; the future of such open source dashboard development may lie in large, experienced teams designing and troubleshooting such tools together. And, while building "from scratch" is not truly free, it may remain far less expensive than storebought tools, and so more attainable with district budgets: the reality is that a tool for easily seeing data "all in one place" otherwise may not exist in Somerville for some time due to the expense of "off the shelf" tools. We're optimistic that next developers 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 '''Technological How-Tos''' in '''[[Overview and key findings: Data dashboards|Overview and key findings]] ''').

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. While our "product" in the end is code instead of a finished piloted product, we believe that the community design process we began will serve next design efforts for "data display."

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.