student data systems

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Charter School Network Offers Its Own Data System to All Schools

September 11, 2012 | 12:00 PM | By
By Lillian Mongeau

As gathering data about student performance becomes a bigger priority in education, schools are faced with different choices on how to capture that data. A slew of tech companies offer a variety of products they’ve developed for schools, but some school districts are creating their own data systems.

California-based charter network Aspire Public Schools is one of them. The school created a data system called Schoolzilla, a web-based data platform that is now available to any school who wants to use it for free. Teachers or administrators can sign up at Schoolzilla to get started. Aspire offers implementation of the system for a fee. So far, there isn’t a set price for the service; it depends on the degree of help each school needs to set it up.

The data tool, originally developed three years ago, allows teachers to synthesize data from multiple sources and create reports. Teachers can see whether the entire class is struggling on a particular math standard, for example, or whether specific students are falling behind. The idea is to help teachers decide what tack to take with individual students.

“Teachers spent hours pulling data out of the attendance system, then the gradebook, then the tests, then matching it all together.”

But academic performance numbers aren’t the only data captured. Since the platform accesses multiple databases at once, teachers can compare things like student absenteeism to their grades. Or they can compare students’ grades to their scores on standardized tests in the same subject. Or they can compare the frequency of calls home with the number of disciplinary actions needed at school.

“Teachers spent hours pulling data out of the attendance system, then the gradebook, then the tests, then matching it all together in massive Excel spreadsheets,” said Anna Utgoff, Aspires’ Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, Aspire, data, Rocketship, Schoolzilla, student data systems

Understanding Learning Analytics and Student Data

August 30, 2012 | 11:40 AM | By

There’s a lot to unpack about learning analytics — everything from how student data is captured to how it will be used. For all of its promises — and there are many, as evidenced below — the two biggest areas of concern regarding using student data are around issues of privacy, as in who has access to student information and what are the possible negative ways that information could be used, and how student data might be used against educators. Privacy is addressed in this otherwise mostly positive infographic, created by Australia’s informED, which takes a crack at explaining all the different aspects. What else would you add to it?

Learning Analytics: Leveraging Education Data – An infographic by the team at Open Colleges

 

FILED UNDER: Research, data, learning analytics, student data systems

How Will Student Data Be Used?

July 3, 2012 | 8:00 AM | By

Over the next few months, a handful of states will take early steps to try to solve a problem that’s become a by-product of the digital age: navigating the flood of student data.

Right now, all sorts of student data are being kept in everything from testing programs and instructional software to grade books and learning management systems. But the data are often trapped in the program and not easily extracted or combined with other data on the same student, creating the educational equivalent of the Hotel California: data can check in any time it likes, but it can never leave. Or be used effectively by teachers.

So a new initiative, supported by state education leaders and funded by prominent foundations, plans to provide a place in the cloud for each state to store all data for every student, using “free” open source software. And, in the process, student achievement information will be connected to instructional apps and web resources. That is, as long as the effort can address concerns about technology, privacy, and whether enough education companies will want to build products for a system that could undermine parts of their own businesses.

In a nutshell, this describes the complicated Shared Learning Infrastructure, being built by the near-namesake Shared Learning Collaborative. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, data, Shared Learning Collaborative, Shared Learning Infrastructure, student data systems

Standardizing Student Data: How to Make it Relevant

July 21, 2011 | 3:29 AM | By

Dave Dugdale

Schools have long dealt with data, tracking students’ personal information, grades, courses, attendance and the like. But for the most part, these records have been scattered across filing systems — electronic and otherwise. Although most states have implemented some sort of system by which to collect and monitor students’ data, these often remain disconnected. Many databases are not online, and when they are, data often isn’t transmissible because of different databases and file systems.

Efforts are underway to help standardize student data, and this week, two new developments occurred in this vein.

As EdWeek’s Sarah Sparks reports, the Common Education Data Standards Initiative released the first draft of the second stage of its core data definitions.

The initiative has been working on these standards for almost a year now, trying to devise standards so that a student’s school-related information can move with him. As it stands, even within districts, it’s been difficult to transfer students’ data throughout their academic career.  This new development makes it easier to track the data, whether it’s a matter of moving from grade school through high school or from high school to college, or moving from one school to another, in the same or different city or district.

It will be done by creating a common framework for the fields of information schools track. Some are obvious: name, address, city, zip. But they get increasingly complex: teacher base salary, student race/ethnicity, grade level (“junior” versus “grade 11″ for example), course name, Common Core Standard alignment, to name just a few examples. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Research, data, student data systems