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I was flipping through old copies of the eSchoolNews when I came across a really interesting quote from last year’s “Resource, Allocation, Reinvestment, and Education Reform” conference hosted by the Center for American Progress.

It came from Karen Hawley Miles, the founder and executive director of Education Resource Strategies, a non-profit organization that specializes in strategic resource management for school systems in need of such a thing.

“Here’s an example of how most schools work today,” she started, “There is a girl named Tameka.  She is in sixth grade and loves school, but she has low scores in math and a basic reading level.  She now has to change schools to go to seventh grade.  Two out of her five teachers are new.  No one knows Tameka, her scores, or how she learns as a student, because there [are] no data for Tameka and there’s no system in place to track, or even assess, Tameka properly.  Now Tameka is failing math and can’t progress to a better reading level.

Per the article I was reading, she then went on to clarify that it’s not totally the fault of the teachers for dropping the baton, because they never received the information that was necessary to address Tameka’s specific needs.  Education Secretary Arne Duncan observes that educators and officials are “shooting in the dark” because of this failure to disseminate useful information.

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This lack of data-driven decision making in schools has received strong emphasis from Duncan and many other experts in the field and frankly, I’m totally surprised that this information-blackout is still the status quo.

This era is being shaped by unprecedented access to fast, global information, and even with less money available, I think that the tools to harness information about students are as accessible as they’ve ever been.

For example, I have a cousin who is a little older than Tameka, and I know that at this moment I can go to the Internet, locate her disembodied personality on the Internet, and glean all types of information about her school career.  Actually, let’s find out now!  I’ll go straight out to the wilds of the Internet and see what school-related information I can get, starting with only her first and last name. 

……out to the social network jungle and back again……..

Ok, I found out that she did her homework today, that she has volleyball practice after school, and that Mrs. Desantis totally hates her.

I also learned that OMGG SHE LOVES SOME GUY NAMED JACOB BLACK SINCE LIKE 3RD GRADE!!

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Now that I’ve cheerfully (and jokingly) trivialized the efforts of everyone who has stepped up to meet this challenge, l’ll get serious.  The point of this little exercise was to suggest that information flows so freely now that it shouldn’t take an extremely expensive, unapproachable system to overcome the information-blackout.  A well-designed system should be able to easily capture and assess quantitative data like assessment scores, while not being prohibitively expensive.

I talked to one of the founders of OnCourse about what types of systems currently exist, besides the one that we have recently released called OnCourse Student Stats.

He’s quite the expert, and he went on to describe one of the industry’s biggest student assessment software packages and its enormous array of bells-and-whistles and trend analyzers and tracking tools.
 
“Wow,” I said, “that sounds like a pretty good system for a school.”

“Yes it is,” he replied, “if that school has 300,000 extra dollars.”

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Then, he popped open the new OnCourse Student Stats tool and demonstrated some of the crucial elements of a student data-analysis tool:

1)    Power, tempered with usability;  the system has to be able to store and analyze longitudinal data for each student over the course of their school career – it also has to be easy to report on this data and to extract useful statistics and information from it;  OnCourse Student Stats has been built to balance these things, and as more of our schools start to use it, it will grow and change to fit best into the hands of the educators

2)    Assessment capability;   the bread & butter would be state assessment scores, but an ideal system will also be able to accept, compile, and analyze other information, like demographic statistics, extra-curricular activity information, qualitative data, etc.

3)    Ease-of-distribution;  the best information in the world is useless if the teachers can’t access it, and this is where OnCourse really stands out – Student Stats is designed specifically to get relevant report results instantly into the hands of teachers so they can use it to write lesson plans targeted to the needs of their students;  this tool is also web-based, which decentralizes accessibility and make the information accessible

4)    Cost;  OnCourse Student Stats doesn’t cost $300,000

These elements described are for a Student Analysis tool only, and since I have passed my self-imposed 700 word limit, I'll only superficially mention that utilizing this tool alongside other OnCourse tools, like the Lesson Planner, yields a beneficial symbiosis, the extent of which grows in relation to the resourcefulness of the newly informatized school staff.

I thought I made that word up, informatized, turns out that's an actual word!  Man, the Internet is cool!

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In the last entry, I forgot to post the new video that I had created.  Tada!

Because of a righteous vacation into the Amazon Jungle, I missed this year's NECC conference and the keynote debate that I've written about in the last few blog entries, entitled 'Brick and mortar schools are detrimental to the future of education'

I invoked a little bit of cyber-savvy to go back in time and sit in a virtual audience for an Internet replay. The relevance of this action, in context, was not lost on me.

I was immediately captivated by Dr. Gary Stager, who represented the type of kinetic lunacy that gives energy to the ed-tech moment.  One of his main points was that we must do more than simply digitalize what we do already, which is the philosophical tether that keeps education technology from moving forward.

His idealism is positive, but it was Cheryl Lemke of the Metiri Group that brought the discussion down to present-day relevance for me.  She posits that today's youth have both a physical, local existence and a virtual, global one, both of which need to be educated.  This feels to me like a very important thing to understand. 

Nowadays, a teenager might go out for a few hours to a party, and upon returning home they will spend the subsequent few hours updating their online profiles with pictures and descriptions of that event.  That is IF the teenager even waits to get home;  she might be tweeting about what's going on at the party from inside the party.  Don't know what tweeting is?  Find out now, because its here for the immediate future.  I was content to let it fade away as another Internet fad, until a certain current event changed my mind.

The Twitter Revolution

My attitude about Twitter changed completely during the recent political uprest in Iran, which has been called by some the Twitter revolution.

In the aftermath of the disputed Iranian elections, mobile communication and social networking websites went down.  Under the pressure of crisis, the youth turned to Twitter to pass along messages and to organize the massive demonstration rallies.  When those feeds were also interrupted, freedom-of-information advocates around the world set up their personal computers to be virtual hosts, or proxies, to help Iranians skirt around obstruction and let the messages through.

Tens of thousands heard the call.  This type of collaboration shows the sheer power that can result from the mixing of technology with necessity and creativity.

Innovating to the Task;  Twitter Tests

There is a teacher, artist, and blogger named Shelly Blake-Plock who has just conducted and blogged about a Latin test using Twitter to encourage collaboration and feedback.  The details of his experiment, while still a little messy, are very interesting to read about.

He is a proponent of a completely paperless classroom, and believes that to move boldly into the 21st century, we must do more than simply digitalize what we do now, as did Dr. Stager.  We have to the take the crisis at hand and innovate to the challenge, as the Iranians did.

One point must not be overlooked;  the reason the Iran message was able to go through was because there were many average people with a little bit of tech-savvy that set their computers up as proxies.  It is necessary for the average folks, teachers and otherwise, to be competent enough on the computer to let the spark from the innovators 'catch' and spread.

For this reason, I'm very excited to see many new schools calling into our offices here to get signed up for the OnCourse Suite.  These tools do, in fact, digitalize a lot of what's already been done, but it helps teachers to do those tasks faster, and in many cases, smarter.  A non-technical teacher might not feel quite so intimidated after getting acclimated to using our system for lesson plan sharing or website building or student stats data mining.

And then, once everything is easy-peasy, there might just be a moment when a teacher says…..

Now…what else can I do with this??

We've had lots of teachers already who have crossed this threshold, and who have communicated with us to help shape their tools of the future.  Got any ideas?  We do!  Wait and see our new Dashboard feature, which will give every OnCourse user the control to put their most-used tasks right at the front of their screen.  It essentially flattens out the program to give quicker access to useful features.

Got any others?  Send 'em over!

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