Social discussion of CS in K-12

["Smith, Kathleen Rapp" <smithka AT illinois.edu>]

Things have changed if teachers are allowed access to what you described. Privacy forbid that a decade ago.  That a student is reduced to a large set of easily accessed (and therefor not very secure) data makes me cry.   Just my thoughts.

Mathematics is the Language of the Universe.

Kathleen R. Smith
University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign
Department of Mathematics, Retired
217 687-2889

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From: David Hohman [hohmanda AT champaignschools.org]
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2015 3:39 PM
To: Avigail Snir; Smith, Kathleen Rapp
Cc: ctrl-shift AT lists.mste.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: [Ctrl-Shift] IT trends in schools: driving decisions with data

Hello Shifters,

We are in a very busy time for the Educational Technology Department so we decided to wait on moving forward with the Digital Dashboard implementation discussion for last nights board meeting.  However, this will show up again so I would like to add my 2 cents to keep this discussion going. 

We have a tremendous amount of data for students, buildings, programs, tests, teachers, administrators, classes, demographic groups, grade levels, years, etc.  We are asked by all administrators, program coordinators, curriculum coordinators, and many others to create reports for a particular entity.  This is a manual process of creating a report in one program to extract the data (Cognos), combining the data using another program (MS Access), and using a third program to display the data (MS Excel).  The number of students, programs, tests, etc. continues to grow and the need to have an effective way to extract and display usable data continues to grow.  Our data team of 1.5 people is having a difficult time keeping up with the demand.  

DecisionEd is a data warehousing and reporting service that gives every user the extracting, combining, and reporting tools at their fingertips.  They continually collect data from a variety of sources (PARCC, ACT Aspire, AIMS Web, MAP, Wonders, grades, discipline, attendance, interventions, programs enrollment) and have hundreds of pre-written reports that display data that are relevant to the user.  A building principal can look at reports that give her a view by grade level or by teacher, a teacher can look at reports by students or by groups, and the superintendent can look at entire grade levels or entire schools.  When looking at this data they can ask those critical "what about" questions that come up when looking at data.  (Ex. What about just a specific group?  What about last year?  What about the last 4 years?  What about their reading/math scores?)  Right now it's a manual process to go back through the extraction, combination and reporting steps to answer that "what about" question but with DecisionEd it is simply a click of a button.  

I agree with Kathleen that a veteran teacher who is able to assess their students in a number of ways will eventually have a strong understanding of the students strengths and weaknesses in your class for the rest of the school year.  However, a digital warehousing and reporting tool allows you to go back and forth in time and spread out to all aspects of the student, giving you a strong starting point at the beginning of the year, and continual tracking tools to cover all students.  For time travel - the dashboard collects all test and grade data every year for a student and puts them at your fingertip.  As a teacher I can quickly get a sense of their performance over time.  I can know from day 1 if a student might need support in a particular area.  I can also know from day 1 if a student in underperforming in a particular area based on past performance.  As we all know this is difficult to do for 120+ students as a teacher and it is difficult to do for 400+ students as an administrator.  DecisionEd has the ability to monitor student performance over time and automatically send email alerts to teachers and administrators if there is a discrepancy based on years of past performance.  This is done for attendance and discipline as well.  Just imagine if we could catch students and put in supports BEFORE their academics or behavior became an issue.  It takes just a few seconds for a teacher or an AP to check in on a student that they know needs a little encouragement.  If we miss this opportunity and the student continues down this path it takes a lot longer to retake a class or deal with discipline referrals or suspensions.  I am also able to get a picture of the rest of my students performance in all curricular areas as well as their social emotional performance with a few simple clicks.  

Charles you mentioned that we could look at adding staff to perform these tasks.  It would take a lot of people to constantly monitor almost 10,000 students.  It would also take a lot of people to be on call to create the reports that are needed by everyone and be on call to modify the report when we are asking those critical questions.  DecisionEd has come to the top as our choice for the data warehousing and reporting program that gives everyone the freedom to get to usable data in a timely fashion.  

I'll also be at Ctrl-Shift tonight if anyone want's to talk about this more. 

Dave Hohman

Director of Educational Technology

Champaign Unit 4 Schools

703 S. New Street

Champaign, Illinois 61821

217-351-3801

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From: ctrl-shift-bounces AT lists.mste.illinois.edu <ctrl-shift-bounces AT lists.mste.illinois.edu> on behalf of Avigail Snir <avigail AT snir.org>
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2015 4:57 PM
To: Smith, Kathleen Rapp
Cc: ctrl-shift AT lists.mste.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: [Ctrl-Shift] IT trends in schools: driving decisions with data

 

A very good point from the teachers' side. I wonder what type of data the administration needs to the tune of so much money.

Avigail

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 4:24 PM, Smith, Kathleen Rapp <smithka AT illinois.edu> wrote:

As a former teacher I can say that data useful to a teacher is usually gathered by the teacher.  The data received from the "administration" is always from the semester (or generally year) prior to when the teacher needs it.  The life of a student changes so drastically in 12 months, even if only by maturity.  Good teachers learn to take what last year's data says with a grain of salt. 

In the later years of my teaching it was no longer acceptable to "go down to the last year teacher's room and have a conversation about Stu."  That was the best data.  Talking about a particular student with another human who spent 180 days with that student.

If a teacher knows how to use a spreadsheet and pull info from a database, then maybe good decisions could be made for a "full class" decision, but short of that, the ole "quartile report from the ISAT" was fine for a base from which to work.  There is no way the IT guys pulling the data can answer every question a teacher might ask, so there is no reason to collect, store and analyze data that will have no real purpose. In many cases the person asking for the data analysis is not sure what they want, or implies that correlation implies causation when of course we all know that is not true!    Sure the district can use the data to make points, but districts have been known to make data lie, so district data driven decisions are always suspect.

I can not see any argument for spending that type of money to manage data. 

Kathleen

Mathematics is the Language of the Universe.

Kathleen R. Smith
University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign
Department of Mathematics, Retired
217 687-2889

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From: ctrl-shift-bounces AT lists.mste.illinois.edu [ctrl-shift-bounces AT lists.mste.illinois.edu] on behalf of Charles Schultz [sacrophyte AT gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2015 2:17 PM
To: ctrl-shift AT lists.mste.illinois.edu
Subject: [Ctrl-Shift] IT trends in schools: driving decisions with data

Yo, Shifters!

At Monday's school board meeting, there is an item to request approval for a piece of software that acts as a tool to consolidate and analyze information and help administrators make decisions. Among the many buzz-words, we call this "data driven decisions" and "business intelligence". I cannot deep-link the agenda item (right, David?), so I will copy portions here.

Before I paste, here are my questions:

1. Do we have too much data in the first place? Apparently we have more than we can handle presently
   
2. "School" is becoming more and more like a business; is this a bad thing?
   
3. Crikey, $50,000/year for upkeep and maintenance!?!? Is this the best we can do?

I am not a teacher, but I do have a career in Information Technology; I understand the jargon, I see the trends. But what is truly best for our students? I firmly believe that what is best for our students is also best for our society.

Here is the excerpt from the school board agenda:

Right now our over-taxed data team works very hard to get data reports as quickly as possible that help us make instructional and environmental decisions.  Data comes from a variety of sources and often times we spend an extraordinary amount of time getting the right data collected into one file and then even more time creating a chart or table that displays the data in a useful way. This is not sustainable to keep up with the changing needs of 19 campuses and a growing number of programs and activities that require data analysis.  We need our data to start working for us.  We need a better, faster, more robust, instantly customizable, constantly updated data repository that gives us reports and analysis so we can make timely decisions for our students’ academic and social well-being.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS:

The software (including set up/training) costs $252,000.  The annual fee of $50,000 covers ongoing upkeep and necessary changes.   

Data Driven Graduation White Paper (2).pdf (552 KB)

DecEd_Decatur CS (2).pdf (205 KB)

VoicesfromDistrict (2).pdf (193 KB)

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Charles Schultz

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