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Digital Door Project
| Overview | DPS Data Needs | Digital Door Portals | SchoolNet |
Overview
The Digital Door Project will enable DPS principals, teachers, and other academic staff to access, in one place, not only the latest information about their students, but also connect that information to historical information about individual students, develop trend data about specific groups of students, and analyze the effectiveness of particular programs, teachers, and interventions to inform future practices.
As the district has set ambitious goals for student achievement, graduation rates, and college enrollment, the functionality of the Digital Door Project will enable the district's academic staff to have data at their fingertips, organized by year, by assessment, and by standard. With this information, staff can make informed decisions in doing flexible student grouping, in accessing specific curricular resources, and in utilizing reports that inform these practices.
The District's academic leadership team and Digital Door Project Team envision the systems being an invaluable asset to accessing data, providing teachers access to content for use in daily instruction, and for sharing strategies across schools (and perhaps across states) to leverage excellent practices, wherever they may be found. The Digital Door portals will become the tools around which our academic staff builds their academic practices.
The Digital Door Project will enable the district to make significant strides towards the DPS Three Common Expectations:
1) Fidelity to core curriculum and improved instructional practice.
By making all critical District curricula available, aligning resources to achievement results and enabling the systematic grouping of students, the Teacher Portal will inform teachers' instruction in a way we've never been able to do before.
2) Implementation of assessment and data analysis strategies to drive student achievement.
The Administrator and Teacher Portals will drive users to a data-driven environment. Schoolnet's format for analyzing assessment and achievement results will make accessing data, diagnosing needs and implementing interventions a much more streamlined process.
3) Utilization of School Improvement Plan as a roadmap for all school initiatives and reforms.
The data inside the Administrator Portal will help to inform the development of sound School Improvement Plans (SIPs) and will enable administrators to track their progress towards achieving the goals set within their SIPs.
DPS Data Needs
DPS has several disparate data systems for educators to use to pull together a holistic view of achievement of a student, classroom, school, network or the district. Today, analyzing student data and implementing intervention and instructional strategies is a daunting task. To properly analyze and drive decisions based on data, teachers, administrators and academic leadership must take critical time away from planning and delivering instruction to collect, compile and analyze data.
The need for more efficient and effective ways to look at data and access resources has been made apparent by school administrators and teachers alike. Several district focus groups were organized to determine the needs of teachers, principals, and other instructional leaders. To drive performance management in academics, focus group participants expressed needs for:
- Timely access to data
- Single place to access array of data and systems
- Reports in meaningful and actionable formats
- Quick access to curriculum and other resources connected to data results
- Opportunities for social professional networking
The Digital Door Project seeks to be the solution by providing data in meaningful formats and allowing educators to take swift action to impact student achievement.
Digital Door Portals
The Digital Door Project seeks to provide DPS educators with a one-stop-shop to access important systems, view critical data reports and discover resources to help execute interventions. To accomplish this, DPS has architected a system of web portals built on Microsoft Sharepoint technology. The Portals are websites, accessible from any computer, designed to meet the needs of specific end-user groups. The Portals are designed to know their users: what they do, where they're from and what information they need to see. The Administrator Portal is designed to meet the needs of school principals, APs and other academic leadership. The Teacher Portal will be available for teachers and other school-based academic staff.
The Portals offer:
- Single-sign-on to frequently used district applications
- Links to important websites
- Data reports and analysis capabilities
- Document repositories for important district forms
- Resources for improving student achievement
The Portals are part of an intranet network, which means they are designed for use within the District and have a comprehensive security model. Access to the Portals is secured by the district and users must have a DPS assigned username and password. The usernames and passwords will be administratively controlled and monitored by DPS to make sure that only authorized users may access the system. This extensive set of security features is necessitated by the presence of FERPA and other information, such as individual student achievement data, which requires the District to take great measure with its security and protection under state and federal laws.
The Portals do not replace the functionality from existing systems; however, they do compile, aggregate and present the data from multiple systems so it is accessible from a single place in actionable views.
Schoolnet
Schoolnet is an instructional management system that will be embedded and operated inside the Administrator and Teacher Portals. Schoolnet will be available inside the Administrator Portal starting in November 2009 and will be ready when the Teacher Portal is released in January 2010.
The benefits for implementing Schoolnet inside the Portals are to:
- Access student data, making the data gathering and analysis process more efficient and consistent.
- Quickly diagnose student needs based on their performance on assessment framework detailed standards.
- Directly access curricular and instructional resources specific to students' needs.
- View and modify electronic calendar and lesson planner with pre-populated District curriculum specific to teachers' grade level and content areas.
- Instantly identify and implement targeted instructional interventions informed by data.
- Measure impact of curricular interventions on student learning.
Schoolnet functionality will bring the following features into the Administrator and Teacher Portals:
Robust history of student data (aggregated from disparate source systems): Includes attendance, behavior, enrollments, academic record, program participation and demographic information. Data can display at a district, network, school group, school, grade, teacher or individual student level. Up to five years of student data will be accessible, with the amount of history growing as the system matures.
Assessment and benchmark data analysis: Schoolnet will display standardized tests (CSAP, CSAP-A, COACT, CELA) and content area benchmarks results for educators to analyze. With the future vision of adding more frequent assessments in the system for progress monitoring.
Standards alignment: All student assessment data will be aligned to state standards, enabling a connection between assessment data and the DPS curriculum. The standards alignment is the key to diagnosing student needs and providing resources to improve instruction and meet those needs.
District curriculum: The District will load all curricular content (including special subjects and special education) from the curricular units to instructional units to individual lesson plans. This includes District created and externally published materials. Teachers' curriculum will be pre-populated for them, based on the courses they teach.
Pacing and planning calendars: The District will pre-populate teachers' calendars with pacing and planning guides by subject. Teachers will easily be able to modify their calendar with whole group and/or small group lessons of their choosing and change their daily lessons when informed by newly available student performance data.
Student groups and interventions: Teachers will be able to manage student groups directly from the student achievement data. Additionally, teachers will be able to continually monitor progress of those student groups following the interventions they implement. Individual student strengths, needs and intervention plans can be recorded by the teachers directly into Schoolnet. This allows teachers to view a qualitative history on a student.
Schoolnet, Inc. is one of the leaders in data-driven decision making for K12 school districts. Schoolnet's award-winning Instructional Management Suite (IMS) helps districts improve efficiency and increase student achievement. Schoolnet's IMS provides users with the data, reports, and tools to align curriculum, assess performance, analyze results, individualize instruction, and communicate with parents. Schoolnet's solutions are used successfully by many of the nation's largest school districts including, Chicago Public Schools and the School District of Philadelphia. SchoolNet is recognized by Inc. Magazine's Top 500 List and Deloitte's Fast 50 and as one of the fastest growing private companies. For more information, please visit www.schoolnet.com.
