In Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World, Culatta takes a career’s worth of insight into how technology is impacting and impacted by educational interests and packages these ideas in a convincing and very personal narrative for anyone trying to serve our children’s best interests across a spectrum of outcomes: from the basic implications of digital influences on healthy parenting and teaching oversight all the way across the board to impacting our global culture. It’s this span that makes this volume immediately pragmatic. However, it’s his personal stories that show his work as not only endearing but credible. This gives Digital for Good shelflife. The examples of certain apps will likely change, but he’s careful to explain an underlying framework that is evergreen.

Culatta sets the stage in the opening chapter on a stark note: “With no expectation for acceptable behavior and near-complete anonymity, we have created an environment that is optimized for self-destruction.” He points out examples for how much the urgency for better digital citizenship may be unsavory to revisit since most readers will identify with the current state of our culture as a dire one. Culatta reflects on the most current trends that represent two sides of the coin: we need technology/technology is hurting our relationships with each other. The author says, “We have spent the last two decades excitedly finding ways to migrate all kinds of experiences to the digital world, but we haven’t stopped to ask how we will preserve our civil society as it also migrates there.”

The global implications may feel overwhelming, yet the book is organized in a manner that makes incremental progress possible with our own children or those that we teach and support in our schools. Whether we’re changing acceptable use policies for our districts and schools or coming up with a set of agreements for our households, Culatta does something necessary by speaking to both of these places where we can have the most influence on our own behavior as we guide those young minds who haven’t developed to the point of recognizing the inherent traits about what draws us to one technology or another. Both parties need support because as Culatta says:

“The migration from the physical to the digital world represents a fundamental shift in the lives of our children. The events that take place in the virtual world are not ancillary to their lives but are some of the most important elements of them. The limitations of the physical world will not shape or constrain the design of our children’s life events the way they did mine or yours.”

Culatta stays focused on the long-term and far-reaching gains of changing our priorities and harnessing the potential with new agreements and expectations of all parties, end-users and developers alike. He encourages us towards the same goals when he casts a vision for a shared philosophy, admonishing us all that, “We need to commit to establishing expectations for meaningful and civil online behaviors that will allow our children to not only be their best selves online, but bring out the best in others as well.”

The middle of the book is built upon his five areas where we all need to concurrently bolster our skills. This specificity is excellent as each chapter ends with Next Steps and Conversation Starters parents and educators alike can apply in their homes and schools. Here are the five attributes that Culatta has identified as essential for a healthy digital well-being for all:

Balanced. Balanced digital citizens participate in a variety of online activities and make informed decisions about how to prioritize their time in virtual and physical spaces.

Informed. Informed digital citizens evaluate the accuracy, perspective, and validity of digital media and have developed critical skills of curating information from the digital world.

Inclusive. Inclusive digital citizens are open to hearing and recognizing multiple viewpoints and engaging with others online with respect and empathy.

Engaged. Engaged digital citizens use technology and digital channels to solve problems and be a force for good in their physical and virtual communities.

Alert. Alert digital citizens are aware of their digital actions and know how to be safe and create safe spaces for others online.

As he discusses each attribute, he does an expert job considering his audience and making connections to applicable field research. With a call for more deliberate work on all fronts to improve our acceptance and usage of the tools we have grown so curious about or dependent upon but keeping users, vendors, and policymakers continually focusing on becoming more human, teacher, and firstly, student-centered:

When thinking about adapting and changing a school’s or family’s digital culture, it is important to do it with your kids and not to them; involve older kids, who will have suggestions based on habits developed from their own digital experiences.

In essence what Culatta does with Digital for Good is to reprioritize some of our known needs and show how to address them starting now, while reframing relatively recent concerns around the viral nature of digital fads and trends (recent in so much as we know tech is more like mushrooms than oak trees in their overnight development). But much like the Chinese proverb that, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” Culatta doesn’t use fear and uncertainty to persuade, but to inspire: “To become lifelong learners, provide for their families, and become leaders of our civil society, our children must learn how to responsibly use digital tools from a young age.” We should all be able to agree with that idea.

Whether found on the parenting shelf or your classroom desk Digital for Good is a timely message of hope, which is always the most inspiring leadership approach as Culatta coaches us all to work together to this common goal:

Being digital for good is a team sport. Families remain at the center of preparing their kids to be effective digital citizens, but they should not be expected to shoulder the burden alone. We should be continually identifying potentially missing members of the team and work in partnership with social platform providers, governments, and educational institutions to create an effective environment for our kids. This means helping these institutions understand what we’re expecting.

For more, see:

• Getting Clearer: Student Access
• 5 Ideas for Learning About Digital Citizenship

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update.

The post Book Review: Digital for Good appeared first on Getting Smart.

Eric Sheninger’s latest title, “Disruptive Thinking in our Classrooms: Preparing Learners for Their Future” is a book for the moment. He has pulled together universal wisdom from across our field as well as his own work coaching education leaders following the paradigm shift that affected our practice unlike anything before. Sheninger offers guidance for reestablishing familiar pedagogical theories for emerging from disruption in order to best serve learners as teachers, administrators, engaged family members, and others that support our schools and personnel.

As other sectors embrace remote work going forward, students and their families will continue to want more flexibility in learning models from our schools as well. Sheninger wants to ensure we’re not throwing the baby out by the bathwater as in-person learning returns in some form as vaccinations prevail and restrictions are lifted. He encourages us to stay true to the time-tested insights from the pioneers of modern K-12 education in the present, marrying the possibilities that we’re suddenly all afforded by the digital tools that have enhanced in record time to extend the reach of teachers who were engaged in learning from home.

He organizes the book into three parts:

• Re-Thinking Normal
• Re-Thinking Learning
• Re-Thinking the Learner

The chapters in each of the book’s sections are consistent in providing high-, mid-, and low-level entry points for education professionals to revisit time-tested ideas through the lens of all that galvanized us during the peak of learning during the pandemic, no matter whether it was in-person and socially-distanced, learning from home–both synchronously, and asynchronously, or in some hybrid fashion where learners were engaging with instruction both in and out of their familiar learning environments.

Sheninger hopes to redirect our energies to empower the same sorts of gains for students as we move forward after such a disruption as what began in the Spring of 2020. “The future of work requires new skills, and it is up to the K-12 education sector to lead the charge in this area. Skills are not enough, in my opinion. Yes, we want learners to possess the requisite knowledge and skills to meet the needs and demands required of them.” (p.19)

In the opening chapters, he sets the stage with a high-elevation expectation we share as educators, that, “…it is our duty and the role of education to ensure they are confident, competent, and contributing members of society. Above all else, our learners must be able to think and learn differently” (p.19). Blending the right amount of philosophy with pragmatic advice, Sheninger encourages practitioners to reconcile what they believe with what they practice: “…lifelong learning is a must for all of us, not just the kids we serve. For our students to meet the demands and expectations for work now and in the future, we must commit to professional growth now and in the future.” (p.20)

If this vision resonates for the reader, how do we get there? The chapters in the next two sections of the book offer ample opportunities for edleaders to choose low-hanging fruit based on their current state as it aligns with the unique vision they have for their learners. Acknowledging the shrewd resource budgeting that he had to monitor and manage, Sheninger encourages some corporate self-care to extend beyond what many surfaced in the pandemic as essential: “We must make the time to learn and grow as opposed to finding the time. If we rely on the latter, chances are it will never happen.” (p.20)

As idyllic as it seems to incorporate such measures with already scarce bandwidth, this is something that can be carried forward. He goes on to say, “The time is now to move the needle on transformational change in education. The longer we wait, the greater the risk to those we serve-–our kids—and to our future society.”  (p.20)

For all the ways we want to improve the field, our propensity for acquiescing to the gravitational pull of yesteryear will be too compelling when ESSER funding diminishes and we enjoy being in the same room with our learners once again in the first grading period of the new school year. We need to resist those forces when we’re weary and put in place interventions that keep us from resorting to regression during the next inevitable disruption. “If we continue down the track of sustaining outdated practices in education, we will continue to churn out a population of students who may be good at ‘doing school,’ but may not be prepared to do well in life. This applies not only to K-12 but also higher education.”  (p.20)

A long-held but challenging belief is that learning today and beyond must be as personalized for each and every student as possible. Sheninger thinks last year proved we’re able to do that now as long as we have cultivated talent to use the right techniques equipped with appropriate technology. “A renewed focus on creating schools that work for kids through uncommon learning strategies that are not being implemented in schools at scale can help to transform numerous facets of traditional schooling (Sheninger, 2015). Transforming learning is a momentous task that must be driven by unearthing the why across all facets of school culture.”  (p.71) It’s certainly a  complex undertaking, but feasible as the means are there and he discusses the first steps in considerable detail, with ample supports in the book’s Resources appendix.

Now, we’re in an era of our profession where it would be helpful to share the belief that we balance our technology with more adept techniques as practitioners in learning development. Sheninger says, “Pedagogy trumps technology. It also goes without saying that a solid pedagogical foundation should be in place prior to implementing any ‘innovation’.”  (p.85) He goes on, saying, “What is certain is that the future workforce will need to align its mindset and skillset to keep pace with evolving demands. The lesson learned is as simple as it is profound: Don’t prepare learners for something. Prepare them for anything.” (p.81)

He shares his conviction that educators need to change their approach given that “All kids doing the same thing, the same way, at the same time just doesn’t cut it anymore. As a result, there is a need for a shift to a more personal approach to learning.” (p.125). He draws a clear throughline to prior efforts to differentiate learning for students. This means creating more avenues for children of all ages and backgrounds to have agency in their learning pathways.

The book illuminates how authentic relationships between administrators and teachers as well as teachers and students anchor the shift to a more personalized learning model in our schools:

“To fully prepare all learners for their future, we must create classrooms in which disruptive thinking is a major component of the learning process. Disruptive thinking in the classroom will only become a reality, however, when priceless relationships are in place. With these in place, your impact will be felt for generations as the learners you influence today disrupt the bold new world in ways that change it—and us—for the better.” (p.163)

Like the excellent teacher and administrator he was in the first part of his career, Sheninger continues to use his skills to reinforce our own skill development in education leadership by making it practical and applicable.

What I appreciate most from Sheninger is that he’s making the old new again. Instead of clearing the decks from before the pandemic, he’s shining a new light on the proven ideas and those that provided them in the first place. Through the capacity building we all did during the shutdown, it’s important to not reinvent the wheel. We knew things before we’d always wanted to implement. We knew practices in how we orchestrate teaching and learning, design instructional activities and even in how we assess and offer learners feedback have been ripe for the sort of change we experienced last year.

For education leaders looking for a solid professional learning guide that is comprehensive in breadth and depth with so many practical ideas backed up by research, this book would galvanize your team by recalibrating what we know works and making it feasible given the investments happening in our districts right now from federal funding. The book is a fast-paced and inspiring read for any working in and for our schools, looking for a means to elevate their practice with disruptive thinking as we get back to planning to make ’21-’22 the best school year ever.

“Never underestimate your vital role in impacting the life of a child. Students might not realize it now, but later in life many will thank you in their own way for your belief in and commitment to them.”  (p.163)

For more, see:

• Mark White and Dwight Carter on Leading Schools in Disruptive Times
• Personalized Learning Is Special Education and the Time Is Now

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update.

The post Eric Sheninger’s Disruptive Thinking in our Classrooms: Preparing Learners for Their Future appeared first on Getting Smart.

Leading with a sense of urgency is second nature to district and school administrators. We feel compelled to do all we can to support our teachers by empowering them to make every learning opportunity possible for our students. And we do the same for ourselves, regularly investing in professional learning so we can better understand and implement the findings from research in the learning sciences. With so many concurrent needs in classrooms, finding the right time to deploy a new solution or approach can be difficult. It often seems like there’s a polarizing tension between recognizing equity issues in our schools and delaying a response for a better time or season when wide-sweeping changes are called for. 2020 made clear to educators that confronting systemic inequities is a priority. 

The Real-Time Redesign toolkit from TLA reinforces this disposition and provides support to help educators invest in equity and resilience. It’s a quality resource for driving action because it accounts for those realistic restrictions in our professional culture. In fact, the universal benefit of the toolkit’s process is the healthy way in which it approaches change management with humane and equitable solution design.

Is there really such a thing as “the perfect time”?

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. — Chinese Proverb

There may be no such thing as the perfect time for making change in our schools. We can be careful and deliberate with our priorities and commitments, but when it comes to developing systems with equity and inclusion the best time is always the present and the toolkit helps realize this attitude of action in the face of hesitation and real disruption, like COVID-19, by engaging school and district leaders in three key ways:

Then, with the toolkit’s modular design, the team can follow the workflow in its entirety or pick the most achievable components to begin with to match current capacity and still generate results. Regardless of a project’s scope, the three phases of the comprehensive Real-Time Redesign workflow are as follows:

• Come Together: Assemble an inclusive design team while also unearthing challenges your schools are facing, and explore innovative practices around the country.
• Dream Big: Clarify the targeted improvement you seek and identify potential solutions.
• Start Small: Build a prototype of a solution and then pilot it on a small scale.

Throughout each phase, the activities and step-by-step sequencing propel participants towards innovative solutions without being an overwhelming process. The toolkit provides a framework for edleaders starting, managing, and reflecting on their team’s planning and design with real world examples from Strategy Lab districts throughout each section. Teams can flex to focus on emerging priorities as needed, while continuing through the process. 

TLA’s CEO Beth Rabbitt offers a simple assessment of the foundational elements that all edleaders should consider before launching initiatives:

• • Do we have the right team?: The right team is one that inclusively brings in stakeholders (parents, families, students, teachers, community members) at the beginning. Then staying mindful to ensure a diversity of perspectives— especially to include those who have been historically left out of the conversation.
  • Do we have the right tools?: Edleaders need reliable tools to execute meaningful change in their schools and districts. The Real-Time Redesign toolkit’s value is that unlike other organizational change efforts, it can be deployed immediately and is scalable across projects differing in scope and forgiving by design.
  • Do we have the right process?: With the right team and tools in place, the right process completes the formula, which is the intent of the Real-Time Redesign toolkit. It’s a thoughtful progression of activities that flexibly leads a team to design and try out solutions while ensuring equity is paramount in both the process and the work itself.

Together, Rabbitt’s triad paints a picture of both the culture and capacity of a team for taking a specific challenge through the Real-Time Redesign toolkit. For example, Austin Independent School District in Texas is using the process to explore whether cycles of student self-reflection (e.g. assessment, instruction, facilitation of learning) could lead to more mastery-based learning. Also, Phoenix Charter Academy in Massachusetts is using the process to identify and spread strategies within their Primary Person Model that increase engagement and accelerate students’ academic progress. In Washington state, Renton School District is using the process to reimagine high school grading practices. 

Additional Strategy Lab districts piloting the process include: 

• Monterey Peninsula Unified School District: engaging students and teachers to design new systems for personalization and connection;
• Cedar Rapids Community School District: piloting student reflection and goal-setting to support standards-aligned feedback to students; and
• Mastery Charter Schools: integrating ISTE Standards for Students into core content to support achievement and independence in a blended learning model for high school. 

The last year has been ridden with variables, novel and known, that have disrupted school services. TLA’s Real-Time Redesign toolkit is a helpful contribution to continue progress in the face of these seismic disruptions and work with equity in mind. The examples from Strategy Lab districts using the process shows that even amidst crisis, schools can make positive and lasting change. Now with the Real-Time Redesign Toolkit, others can do it too—with practical, guided activities that can help tackle small and large challenges effectively and efficiently. 

Learn more about the toolkit and other offerings from The Learning Accelerator here, and be sure to share your questions and success stories when you employ it for your school.

For more, see:

• Building the Car While We’re Driving It: Lessons Learned and Back-to-School Priorities in Four Districts
• Always Ready For Learning: Meeting the Rapidly Evolving Needs of Educators Throughout COVID-19
  

The post TLA’s Real-Time Redesign Toolkit Helps Schools Make Practical and Positive Change appeared first on Getting Smart.

By far, the most enjoyable segment of the edtech stack are those apps focused on specific content, skill development, and the means for communicating and engaging with each other’s learning. And it really is about learning together as teachers model exemplary or expert approaches to new ideas and problem-solving. Since there are scads of published pieces online listing out skill and content apps by topic or capability, this piece focuses on the framework we’ve discussed relative to the learning management system (LMS) and student information system (SIS), describing a bit about how that category at the top of the hierarchy should be supported by edleaders as they interact with teachers and the vendors who create the solutions. At the very least, edleaders can support their evaluation in a way that gives margin but with structure and Digital Promise’s Edtech Pilot Framework could help. But more strategic work can fold that evaluation into a larger context as seen in the diagram above. The pinnacle in the diagram above has similarities to Maslow’s “self-actualization” category. These pieces of edtech represent new content for the learner, new ideas that can enlighten and invigorate. It also refers to those apps that support organic creation of such learning experiences typically more than any feature in an SIS or LMS, whether the UI/UX is for the student or the teacher. Hence, considering it all as part of the “learning object repository” for developing skills and introducing content or the means to generate those intrinsically for those using the tools.

Developers contributing to the “learning object repository” rely upon those supporting the LMS and SIS layers of the edtech stack to see the student’s work reflected in daily efforts, periodic progress reports, and eventually the finalized gradebook and transcript. These software companies have the most leeway when innovating new approaches to learning and how they support insight into a learner’s journey for the teachers and administrators employing their tools in regular courses of study, no matter the learning model. They are also the most vulnerable companies in the space, nudged out by the vast number of competitors building upon their early successes. And while this offers a multitude of choices for teachers curating such tools, it can also lead to disruption to the continuity of learning when they can’t fund their apps past the startup phase. Yet many apps get acquired by larger companies, and folded into their suite of tools, receiving more stable development of the product roadmap.

Aside from the content/skill space, great communication tools facilitate sharing and discovery, whether teacher-to-teacher, teacher-to-administrator, or teacher-to-student. Given that many of the vendors in the LMS and SIS space make some effort to afford real-time or near-real-time communication beyond email, this function may not necessitate adding a third-party communication vendor. In some cases, finding a better standalone communication platform could further knit together collaborative efforts throughout the edtech stack, and provide some flexibility for changing those platforms without disrupting the workflow.

So what are steps you can take to ensure your edtech stack is sound and operating optimally for the topmost layer of the stack? Here are some categories and prompts to spur some thinking as you and your team strategize for near-future grading periods.

Teacher Choice

• Does your school’s tech policy allow teachers to choose apps to further personalize learning based on the needs of the student? For the sake of security across the edtech stack, there may be a “command and control” atmosphere to reevaluate to allow for more freedom without giving up security. We address that more below, but the first thing is to wonder about how you can increase the teacher’s presence in such conversations. If your district or school is on the other end of the spectrum, the question evolves into wondering how you can empower those “finders” in your midst and encourage them to teach others how to find the right tools for addressing common needs regardless of classroom or learning environment. Teachers are most often the ones that first encounter unique needs across their rosters and go on the hunt for solutions. If they do so in a vacuum, other teachers and administrators are at a potential loss for their discoveries. But if the culture supports finding and sharing internally, great content and skill apps can more quickly be vetted and implemented to support immediate learner needs.
• What is your process for sharing these apps with other teachers and providing them to students? Depending on the complexity of your school’s edtech stack and culture of users across roles, departments, and even buildings, many rely upon a system to manage devices and push apps out to the appropriate users based on roles and permissions determined by the SIS, LMS, or communication platform(s). Such apps give control and a chance to test apps to prevent them from causing a break in interoperability, but if the vendors are adhering to common specifications like LTI, that risk is mitigated and users won’t have to wait to use the latest version of a single app.

Interoperability

• Does the vendor participate in the LTI program or similar? This could be determined by the product literature on a vendor’s website, but it may also be a question to pose to your customer service or account rep, too. It’s not only a tell of their intent to “play nice with others” as often said but also their maturity as a software company if still young in their product offerings. This paves the way for interoperability requests that put the right information in the right place at the right time for the right people to reference without dual-data entry.
• Has the vendor signed the Project Unicorn EdTech Vendor Pledge? One advantage here is that the Project Unicorn team can offer technical assistance to help translate between schools and the vendors that are participating in the program. Such advocacy can clarify needs and expedite the integration of content, skill or communication app with the rest of the edtech stack in operation at your school or district.

Security and Privacy

Without diverting into policy such as FERPA/COPPA or infrastructural choices such as firewalls that protect local data stores and processes to keep user accounts and passwords secure, there are a few subtopics relevant to the myriad apps we use in our schools to support an individual learner’s needs with confidence.  A student’s privacy in all ways should be protected and there is a certain assumption that we’re doing that. With an expanding footprint to a school or district’s edtech stack, most established vendors can prove their data security protocol in the standards their code is written to adhere to. Implementing these recognized standards should be advertised by the vendor. Some of the most common indicators of their intent to participate in-kind with their data security efforts include options from the following list:

• Signing the Student Privacy Pledge
• ISTE Corporate Membership
• CoSN
• SETDA
• Access4Learning
• IMS Global
• Ed-Fi

Asking your provider or prospective vendors about such measures is always a good idea before you dig further into the details of a service level agreement or sign a statement of work to start migrating core data to a new platform. But in the content and communications space, which are more transient by nature of the types of problems these solutions address and the competition for these vendors relative to the LMS and SIS spaces. Still, here are the questions you might want to ask as you go to market to bolster your efforts to reach all learners with focused tools or to foster collaboration beyond what your enterprise vendors offer in their forums, chat, and messaging.

Who owns the data?

Given that we’ve quietly passed a tipping point for data to be stored in the cloud vs. on-premise, there may be a shift in the ownership of the data being collected by your users day to day. Posing this question to the vendor should always result in them assuring school professionals that though they host and store the data, it is owned by the school wholly.

How are the data stored?

This leads to another question that is correlative to the aforementioned topic of data interoperability and that is how do we extract the data in a consumable format? You may hear about the process for exporting a .CSV file that can be opened in your spreadsheet, text editor, choice, or some other “flat file” format that removes the native database’s infrastructure but leaves data in some other format for parsing by a replacement or augmentation tool.

Summary

When there is a discovered need and a promising piece of edtech to address it, teachers should be empowered as solution finders for their students. If it’s affordable and secure, edleaders should feel confident granting that capacity and learning from the outcomes teachers are able to generate when they apply their findings in their own practice.

For more on auditing and developing your tech stack see:

• Organizing a Modern Edtech Stack for Modern Pedagogy, Part I: The SIS 
• Organizing a Modern Edtech Stack for Modern Pedagogy, Part II: The LMS 

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update. This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures, please see our Partner page.

The post Organizing a Modern Edtech Stack for Modern Pedagogy, Part III: The Learning Object appeared first on Getting Smart.

Though the onset of COVID-19 didn’t reveal the problem with students slipping and falling behind, it underscored the need for a proactive response. Diffenbaugh reviewed the reports forecasting these student failures and knew that continuing with the status quo wasn’t an option. Working with Wodecki, the two gathered a group of early adopter principals and teachers to begin drafting a strategy to improve chances for student success. “This is one area where we have tangible results — this is tangible change,” Wodecki said in support of a rapid shift away from traditional grading as a means to reducing the projected failure rate.

Employing distributive leadership, Wodecki charged her most enterprising teachers and principals to consider what a change in the district’s grading policies would do to turn the trend around. In spite of the urgency, Diffenbaugh and Wodecki were committed to avoiding a top-down mandate. There were teachers already vocal that they wanted a significantly more equitable approach to student feedback supported by the district than the traditional A-F grading scale in their schools. Diffenbaugh and Wodecki urged those frontrunner teachers to get specific about the problems with traditional grading and provide options for an alternative grading policy to begin a shift.

Traditional grading isn’t equitable—it’s just familiar.

MPUSD’s student body is predominantly Hispanic, and thus a high percentage of those students with failing grades on their progress reports were students of color. MPUSD felt traditional grading was overly penalizing and thus discouraging students who weren’t performing—that their policies weren’t equitable. Those learners at-risk for failing a class and most historically-underserved were most affected.

Wodecki’s cohort of teachers and principals set out to determine what the options were to reduce the number of Fs across the student body. What they found were familiar grading policy components that were having a negative impact regardless of intent. Some of these attributes were:

• The A-F/100-point scale
• The exponential weight of a zero in the gradebook
• Penalizing students for work turned in late
• Not allowing for makeup work
• Using low scores as discipline to prevent participating in other activities or privileges

They came to the conclusion that grading had become more about rewarding attempts and punishing inaction instead of offering high-quality, specific academic feedback on mastery of discrete concepts and skills. “If we have thousands of kids we’re going to fail in this pandemic, we are not putting them on a good trajectory for opportunity,” says Diffenbaugh.

Aligned with the evidence of assessment and feedback research from experts like Robert Marzano and Doug Reeves, Wodecki believes that a failing grade does not motivate most kids and, in fact, does harm to students’ self-worth and their perception of the school’s relevance to their lives. “We are doing a lot of harm,” she says, “It’s educational malpractice.” Each zero or failing assignment grade undermines engagement and advocacy. Diffenbaugh believes that if students fail at that rate on his watch, he’s failing as a leader of the district and has humbly made that known to staff and students alike.

District leaders and teachers united to put together an approach for a “do-no-harm” grading policy across the district and brought it to the board for their consent. It was unanimously approved for the remainder of the 2020-2021 school year and MPUSD could continue its strategic transition from traditional grading to a standards-based approach before the pandemic broke.

Confronting The Failure Rate

Given board approval, the district established working groups of standards-based grading early adopters along with their principals and assistant principals. The project team began sharing among their teammates the ideas for creating and adopting a no-harm grading policy. Leaders looked at legal abilities to make policy changes based on a crisis designation. The project became a mission for the team, sending them out into the community to meet with district families in order to increase family and community engagement. Diffenbaugh said, “We had to be making those home visits and setting up those super systems. We had to figure out—for each kid—why they aren’t being successful.” Likewise, the district invested in increasing mental health supports and using community-based referrals when diagnosis and deeper treatment were needed.

The MPUSD data team conducted a breakdown of the number of Fs by teacher and section and gave real-time data to school leadership. This enabled the leaders to have nuanced conversations about how the learning was progressing leading to a downward turn so they could tease out trends and plan interventions student by student. At one point, Diffenbaugh asked, “The kids are logging in, so how do we equate attendance with the magnitude of F’s?” Diffenbaugh’s point to his staff was that digital seat time is no more a corollary to student success than it was with in-person instruction, pre-pandemic.

Teachers were able to look at their gradebooks and, with their principals, get very specific about the variance they saw from adjacent classrooms teaching the same course or material. It started to become apparent to an increasing number of the MPUSD staff that they could afford students with failing grades an opportunity to catch up by proving they know the agreed upon competencies. Diffenbaugh challenged his principals asking, “If they can show you they know it now, why are we penalizing them for not knowing it two months ago?” This led to an agreement of students being able to put forward their last, best, and final assessments to move from failing to a passing grade. If the teacher agreed with these three artifacts of evidence, the student could move from an F to a passing grade of a D or better depending, and be removed from the failure report, and could begin a recovery with cohort support.

What emerged included switching to the standards-based gradebook from their vendor, Illuminate, publishing explanations of the standards-based approach, and the creation of an individual learning plan (ILP) for each of the students who were experiencing difficulties. Then, they were assigned a 14:1 cohort of fellow students with three or more incompletes on their report card. Seaside High School in particular needed significant support. They gathered four cohorts of students with failing grades and the district hired substitute teachers to help with each cohort and protect the intervention from stalling out. She and her educator team felt their struggle wasn’t only worth it, but that it paled in comparison to what their students were experiencing.

These shifts happened without a district mandate. The distributive leadership model empowered consensus-building and together the leaders decided the priority of setting up a program to prevent students from slipping even further behind. The goal was to set the student up with the precise supports needed to develop the agency to become successful on their own.

Outcomes & Takeaways

With successful results from changing grading in their own class sections, the early adopters recruited peer teachers and together changed their gradebooks and explained the new standards-based approach to their students and families ahead of the start of the 2019-2020 school year. When the pandemic broke, the early adopters expedited their grassroots evangelizing so that ahead of the 2020-2021 school year yet even more fellow teachers would be prepared to offer grading based on a standard. Now 80% of MPUSD teachers use the standards-based approach for explaining to students what is being measured on an assessment.

The failure rate at MPUSD dropped by 60% (from 1,500 F’s down to 500 F’s) since the first quarter progress report following the application of the 2020 spring semester’s do-no-harm policy, layered on top of the accelerating shift to standards-based grading, district-wide. More students are on a path towards academic success, and family engagement is significantly higher than before the shift.

Considering every educator wants to see their class or school failure rate as low as possible, there are a few keys to MPUSD’s progress thus far. They learned:

• When you see a problem in how students approach learning, invest in solving it.
• The permanence of the student’s transcript is a moral obligation of the educators contributing to it. Final grades deserve serious consideration.
• Grading policies aren’t sacrosanct and can be changed
• Having a data team with the capacity to provide real-time feedback to teachers and administrators is critical.
• Seek out Student Information System (SIS) and Learning Management System (LMS)  that offer a quality standards-based gradebook or integrate seamlessly with third-party gradebooks that support standards-based grading.

Next Steps

Acknowledging that the effort to stem the failure rate required a lot of hard work and collaboration, MPUSD isn’t stopping. They’re motivated to see struggling students become more successful. A failure report that diminishes in time reinforces that their continuously improving interventions have boosted academic performance. This means increased opportunities for each MPUSD student to progress in their learner’s journey. The district is committed to seeing all MPUSD teachers adopt a standards-based grading model prioritizing mastery of competencies and personalize learning for every student. MPUSD is making a difference by providing a more equitable learning experience that sustains engagement and demonstrates care for students’ success without sacrificing rigor or standards.

For more, see:

• A Reliable Hybrid Learning Model: Cedar Rapids Schools Responds to Setbacks 
• Organizing a Modern Edtech Stack for Modern Pedagogy, Part II: The LMS 
• Organizing a Modern Edtech Stack for Modern Pedagogy, Part I: The SIS 

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update.

The post How Monterey Peninsula Unified School District Reduced Their Failure Rate by over 60% appeared first on Getting Smart.

This optimism came on the heels of a seemingly unending string of challenges: from the global shift to remote learning, to battling cancer, all the way to a severe windstorm that rattled her district and community to the core. She took these obstacles in stride and still maintains that the district is  “a hope spot” for the entire community—an imperative mindset to keep moving forward.

When CRCSD published its ambitious future-ready facility master plan in 2018, the district rallied around Superintendent Bush’s vision to repurpose learning spaces across the district to best serve their 17,000 students with a community hub model. As bold as that plan was, it didn’t forecast simultaneously negotiating a global pandemic and a destructive storm as factors and sharing their evolving strategy with the entire learning community. Already attuned to the diverse needs of an Iowa community with a sizable population of multinational refugees, district leaders were accustomed to considering how to communicate with households in five different languages including French, Swahili, and Spanish. In short, their situation was complicated.

In response to the pandemic in March of 2020, CRCSD leadership pivoted to keeping students and staff safe for the remainder of the school year and launched their “Return to Learn” website to explain their intent to provide “the best instructional environment for your child/children (in-person, remote, or Cedar Rapids Virtual Academy (CRVA) based on the choices offered by the district.” Pre-COVID, the district was projecting 250 applicants to CRVA from their middle and high schools. Once the pandemic’s long timeline began to emerge, 700 students applied and with that shift in demand for online learning, the district prepared to meet the demand.

Such measures included a household technology survey from the Iowa DOE helping make a case for CRCSD’s broadband needs to the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief fund. The survey results showed 2,000 households in need of better internet service so the team began to prepare for this technical undertaking.

Then in August, just as their plan for returning to school was about to ramp up, an unusual storm of wind and thunderstorms hit. Designated by meteorologists as a “derecho” for its straight-line gale-force winds, upwards of 140mph, the massive storm wreaked havoc across the midwest, with Cedar Rapids taking the brunt with damaged buildings, leveled crops, and uprooted trees. CRCSD’s facilities were hit hard by the storm. Each of their 32 buildings sustained some damage, including one high school that took nearly ten months to restore.

CRCSD’S Executive Director of the Office of Teaching and Learning, John Rice, focused on how these combined factors would impact their plan for instructional delivery. Rice’s team had their work cut out for them but leaned on his prior experience designing blended instructional activities when he worked for the District of Columbia Public Schools. As it has been for all school leaders of recent, the stakes were high: recovering if not salvaging a year of learning for as many students as possible.

Connecting to a Network of Experts

Rice and his team looked externally for support as they navigated their response to the pandemic. The first phase was solely-focused on making certain all members of the learning community were safe from harm and made aware of the measures being taken to adhere to safety guidelines from the CDC and the state of Iowa relative to positivity rates. In an effort to expand its knowledge base, Cedar Rapids sought support through the Always Ready for Learning Coaching Network, a group of education experts organized by The Learning Accelerator (TLA).

Later that spring, Cedar Rapids joined TLA’s Strategy Lab, a new networked learning community supporting school systems with recovery and long-term planning for resilient and equitable teaching and learning. Through the Strategy Lab, Cedar Rapids received specific guidance from The Parabola Project, a joint venture from TLA and Harvard and Brigham’s Ariadne Labs. Their health guidance helped Cedar Rapids provide their community with protocols for safely approaching in-person learning. This set the stage for the ‘20-’21 school year to be able to switch to socially-distanced in-person learning (when and where they were able) across their 31 schools and with over 1,000 teachers.

CRCSD Responds With Fully-Online, Hybrid, and In-Person Instructional Approaches

What emerged for the fall of 2020 was a delicate balance of in-person, hybrid, and fully-online options from the district. Parents were afforded the choice between all three options based on their needs and their personal comfort with assuming the risks of COVID.

With a safety plan coming together, the strategic planning shifted to adjusting instructional practice for Rice and his fellow leaders. Prior to the pandemic, Cedar Rapids’s focus had been equipping their educators to differentiate and personalize instruction, having already started a shift away from traditional to standards-based grading policies. With some initial guidance from the Strategy Lab, the team compiled ample, high-quality research- and data-based thinking. Together, the team devised approaches to the difficult issue of keeping students and staff safe while staying as true as they could to the district strategic plan they’d committed to before the pandemic. This meant layering on top of an already-emerging blended learning strategy some adjustments.

The largest initiative here was the Cedar Rapids Virtual Academy (CRVA) for middle and high school students. The Iowa Department of Education approved the district’s plans to offer a rigorous and standards-aligned model to give Cedar Rapids families one more option to consider, keeping in mind the eventual end of the pandemic. CRVA has been well-received as a viable option for families regardless of COVID or other interruptions to in-person learning.

After experimenting and deliberating to design new delivery options, the CRCSD team published sample hybrid schedule options for each, elementary, middle, and high school that show the relationship between learning occurring in-person or online (both synchronous and asynchronous):

Figuring out schedules that logistically worked wasn’t the extent of it. The team had to assume a generous stance towards equity and develop processes for solving infrastructural issues with connectivity en masse, provide technical assistance and guidance for families logging in for blended learning, and ensure students working from home had the same access to in-person learning materials.

To begin with, the district expedited its plan to extend their 1:1 program to elementary school students. This meant reallocating significant dollars from the district’s general fund to purchase devices, service plans, and accessories. Fortunately, they were able to recover that investment from the CARES Act. Their subsidizing of costs continued with grants and arrangements with local ISP providers to ensure each family had high-quality broadband, including providing 2,000 wifi hotspots to families.

With infrastructural solutions in place for learning from home, the district drafted and executed plans for harnessing the dramatic increase in family engagement. This entailed writing and publishing instructions for lessons online as well as sending home hard copies. Then, training calls were held to go even further in ensuring that the parents felt comfortable and supported as learning resumed. And they did all of this in the five different languages represented in the district. The district was careful to survey their families extensively and through a variety of channels to make certain they’d surfaced as many needs as possible to keep online learning going as well as continuing to be able to offer the wraparound services families needed.

Lastly, the district had to expand the curriculum budget to buy exponentially more learning materials typically relegated as classroom sets of texts, devices, and manipulatives. These texts, art supplies, and other paper and plastic learning objects were ordered, sterilized, and repackaged every six weeks and sent home with families. 

Transforming Teaching & Learning Across the District

With safety and hybrid scheduling guidelines established, Cedar Rapids could turn their attention to making adjustments to instruction. CRCSD was already pursuing a goal to gradually shift to a personalized, competency-based learning model. Prior to the pandemic, the team took cues from schools like Summit Public Schools and began adapting those ideas to the upper grades initially, then before the launch of the ‘20-’21 school year, did the same for elementary grades as well. This indicated the need to get devices into the hands of each elementary learner and rapidly aid elementary teachers with moving their instruction into Google Classroom.

With the district concurrently in the early stages of a multi-year educational technology plan, the pandemic greatly accelerated the district’s preconceived plans for device rollout, teacher professional learning, and use of digital tools. Working with the district CTO, the team focused on developing and adapting content for virtual instruction based on school models from across the country and their interactions with other districts in the network. An early win has been the positive reception of blended learning course and activity templates or “shells” in their district-wide use of Google Classroom for younger learners and Canvas for upper-grade levels. This provides momentum and consistency for the learner as they switch from one virtual classroom to another, which protects student engagement and reduces the weariness of teachers designing online instruction for the first time this past year.

A Philosophical Shift Towards Competencies Over Content

With all these converging changes, district leaders notice educators thinking differently about how they move through the curriculum. There’s a shift underway from a “march through the textbook” fashion of following the pacing guide to one that’s driven by standards. Rice notes that staff have been a lot more attentive to that shift and allowing for different modalities of teaching and learning.

Rice said that one of the most challenging time periods during the summer of 2020 was figuring out what professional learning should look like in the late summer when teachers returned for the fall semester. Through expert sessions with the Strategy Lab, Rice now had access to resources such as those from the CCSSO including a guide for managing change in a school or district’s professional learning approach. Cedar Rapids also gained an on-call consultant from Rhode Island’s Highlander Institute to offer guidance throughout the school year. 

Together, these resources have helped their team transfer their vision for a more learner-centered approach for students to their teachers. Now they are seeing a professional learning culture that is educator-driven and allows teachers to self-pace their own professional development, letting the learning itself be the driver.

Outcomes to Build Upon

The results from Cedar Rapids instructional changes have shown what is possible for districts seeking change in incredibly challenging circumstances. Rice is transparent that the current approach isn’t ideal; however, it keeps equity at the forefront as they continue to forge forward against the challenges, refining as they go, ensuring each and every student and household is equipped to participate in the newly designed learning environment and experiences.

Despite the incredible challenges of 2020, Cedar Rapids has seen some benefits from the experience. Parental engagement has increased, and the district hopes to continue to nurture this trend as learning returns to their repaired buildings. Through the Strategy Lab, CRCSD is piloting student goal-setting with the aim of improving student engagement and ownership of learning, especially in remote learning environments. Pending the results of the pilot, this approach could be scaled more broadly to other grade levels. This is concurrent with expanding CRVA to the elementary grade levels so even more students can have access to online learning.

Additionally, the district is asking teachers, administrators, students, and families what practices from this past year they’d like to keep in future years, such as keeping the school schedules that were adopted during the pandemic for high school (block scheduling) or elementary specials classes (six-week rotations of art, music, and PE rather than every other day). Cedar Rapids is also evaluating what practices should be discontinued, such as having all teachers coming into an auditorium for synchronous professional learning and instead, continue moving towards flexible, asynchronous, personalized professional learning. Thus bringing the same philosophy to adult learning that the Cedar Rapids staff has worked so hard to make possible for their students.

Key Takeaways

What worked for Cedar Rapids can transfer to many schools or districts looking to improve their instructional delivery. Here are the key takeaways from their experience:

• Iterate, delegate, automate with agility: Infusing your school/district with a culture of continuous improvement and innovation in the face of challenges takes time, dedication, and intentionality. CRCSD’s leadership committed to iterating quickly when new variables emerged, built templates for all things repeatable, and automated anything that could be delegated to technology.
• Don’t go it alone; ask for help: Reaching out to other like-minded educators has been a long-standing part of education’s professional culture, but the isolation of 2020 challenged our sense of a network’s value as things became hyperlocal. An infusion of new ideas and energy from others attempting to innovate new approaches is the benefit CRCSD received from others in The Strategy Lab.
• Share the wealth of your discoveries: Your solutions may serve others’ problems and having a healthy forum for exchanging discoveries was critical to CRCSD’s innovation in 2020. Whether it’s a quorum of neighboring school leaders or a formal network like those from TLA, exchange of approaches and data analysis expands efficacy quickly.
• Learning occurs in the student, not the building: Because of the storm damage that came after a stressful summer and before an inauspicious launch of the new school year, CRCSD had no choice but to rely entirely on their online instruction at the start. The staff and community rallied and even without buildings, the school continued because learning occurs in the student!
• Keep sight of your plans: the variables that were out of control for CRCSD were anything but enviable. However, they didn’t allow the pandemic and the storm to derail their goals for long-term planning to improve learning and services for their families.
• Stay hopeful! If CRCSD’s superintendent can take on such challenges and keep learning moving forward, it bodes well for all others contending with similar issues. Prioritize morale and make your district a “hope spot” in your communities as well.

For more, see:

• Phoenix Charter Academy on The Primary Person Advisory Model
• Teaching Through Change, Stories of Resilience: Austin ISD
• Building the Car While We’re Driving It: Lessons Learned and Back-to-School Priorities in Four Districts

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update. This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures, please see our Partner page.

The post A Reliable Hybrid Learning Model: Cedar Rapids Schools Respond to Setbacks appeared first on Getting Smart.

As we discussed in the first post of this series for evaluating your student information system (SIS), the software we use in our edtech stacks are the tools we use to stay organized and keep instruction moving forward which are used by the largest swath of our learning communities. Specialists throughout our schools and in our district central offices may use other tools for productivity or supporting compliance and daily operations, but those platforms in which we invest our instructional intellectual property are the spine of our digital ecosystems tied to the core mission of helping kids grow.

Evaluating the learning management system (LMS) is the focus of this piece. The LMS is where instructional interaction occurs. It’s been said that the teacher is the learning management system and that learning transpires not in schools or in classrooms, whether digital or brick and mortar, but in the learner. Keeping in mind that these sophisticated platforms don’t usurp or displace the exchange between a teacher and learner is an excellent stance for evaluating whether or not the LMS (or how your current LMS has been used thus far) is serving your needs and respecting the agency of both the teacher and the learner.

The goal of this piece is to sharpen discernment for edtech planning and calibration, not favor one vendor over another. Knowing a bit about the other popular options in comparison may assist with continuing further as edleaders plan not just for improving learning this spring semester as well as facilitating a well-designed learning experience for the coming school year.

There are valid reasons to stay with the vendor that you are already familiar with, as long as the sunk cost fallacy isn’t keeping you from exploring other options — a typical roadblock to change. This is an opportune moment for making sure the vendor’s solution is meeting your needs in the present without undermining longer-term growth opportunities such as new learning models or other strategies edleaders are desiring to cultivate and nurture with teachers. For example, a consideration for a change might be to enable deeper engagement in personalized learning amidst remote or hybrid models of support than prior solutions afforded.

Across Texas, schools use a variety of LMS and have for some time, and there are clear frontrunners that have pulled away from other options as a combination of the product’s quality in breadth and depth of features, affordability, and ease of use. The top three cloud-based LMS are:

1. Canvas by Instructure
2. Schoology now owned by PowerSchool and offered free of charge by TEA
3. Google Classroom

There are other vendors to add to the list, both emergent and established, but for the sake of this evaluation exercise, we will start with a high-level comparison then introduce a few prioritized topics as a frame for evaluating any vendor’s offering.

A Quick Comparison

Starting with this year’s major LMS headline, when TEA chose Schoology over other options and partnered to execute a wide-sweeping vision for equipping all Texas schools with a high-performing LMS, it should’ve piqued the interest of current PowerSchool users since the world’s largest SIS had acquired Schoology in November of 2019. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean such data interoperability between the two platforms is superior. There are so many other contributing variables that such a conclusion is too simplistic. Canvas and PowerSchool have had an integration for years and it behooves both companies to uphold it given the millions of users on each. Also, PowerSchool’s unified classroom was built largely from acquiring other edtech companies more than creating new solutions with features that span both SIS and LMS categories in the edtech stack.

In 2014, Google Classroom came along and snuck into thousands of schools as a new part of their already established cloud-based productivity suite with tight integrations to each of those tools teachers and students alike had been using in lieu of Microsoft Office. It’s hard to believe children born when Classroom first launched are now old enough to be students using it in kindergarten or first grade. That ease of use has been quite attractive to teachers of younger learners. Classroom is free and it feels like a free offering, missing core functionality that would put it on par with Canvas and Schoology. Early on, Google Classroom wasn’t an LMS as much as it was a teacher-friendly “content management system” for curating and posting learning activities. As such it was a boon for teachers with their Google Drives loaded with lessons in Docs or Slides, right alongside the Forms and Sheets they were using to track formative assessment data. For many teachers, that was and still remains enough. And for many administrators, free is worth criticisms about the data ethics arguments that flare up on occasion. Google is committed to Classroom continuing to expand its functional footprint, but seemingly uninterested in taking the bait to toe the line with Canvas as Schoology did.

To that end, if you ask a hundred teachers and administrators what features should be included in an LMS, you’ll get a hundred different lists. Presuming the vendor itself is a healthy company with excellent data privacy and security measures, let’s try to consider the software’s essential feature inclusions itself. All LMS should have the best user experience in the following categories:

• A flexible design workflow for building a course of study: the ability to easily create and post a course of study by building out a series of learning experiences in written text but also including the ability to record rich media, but flexible enough to allow a variety of learning models.
• Equitable and accessible UI/UX design for each role: dedicated usage of an LMS with students means a near minimalist’s approach to the design for screens facing teachers and students to avoid confusion and fatigue while the learner works through an activity. With regards to accessibility, this means accounting for the needs of all learners regardless of literacy and language development or an accommodation from an IEP.
• A flexible means for assessment feedback: whether one or many students, the ability to provide written and verbal
• Device ambivalent (not device agnostic): the user’s closest internet-connected device is the right device. If the vendor doesn’t develop elegant solutions that aren’t hampered by the size of the screen or the method for interaction, they’re coming up short for students and teachers alike.
• Extensibility: For all the features an LMS can offer, the content that doesn’t come from original instructional activities authored by the teacher, planning team, or district must be curated from other sources. Canvas and Schoology have relied upon the Learning Tools Interoperability specification (LTI) from IMS Global for offering content and skill app developers to connect securely. Google Classroom has its own bank of API documentation for developers to integrate with their platform, including the capacity to access other material created with Google apps.
• Backend monitoring and analytics reporting: LMS developers offer their admin-level accounts access to the user behavior data in a set of “canned” analytics reports such as number of times and duration for users logging in, by student, class, and activity. Yet these are only useful for informing certain decisions and should not be exclusively referenced for calculating attendance or similar reporting requirements that aren’t as relevant as they once were before. Such user statistics can function as an early warning signal and serve as a conversation starter when engagement drops, but the better indicators lie in the learning data as students attempt projects and activities with more qualitative responses. For administrators, aggregate reporting from the LMS can reveal patterns in certain skill adoption by students, which teachers are exemplary at translating those skills and subsequently promote those teachers’ efforts during professional learning.

Getting the most out of your LMS

The curse of any enterprise-grade platform is that it’s a significant effort to be an expert on all functions and how effective they are at solving the problem for which they were designed. Even so, staying close to your account representative and subscribing to any published literature or online forums can further the value for your students and teachers. Consider the following prompts for getting the most out of your LMS.

• Consolidating and eliminating third-party apps in favor of native ones as long as there is parity.
• Leaning on your rep for understanding all the features, choosing which to implement, and chunking that roll out with your schools without frustrating your high-flying teachers desires to use certain functionality.
• Scheduling regular professional learning experiences each grading period to calibrate usage from backend data.
• Joining the user groups if established, or helping start a pilot user group based on role or a particular school model.
• Appointing a small task team of naturally inquisitive staff to lead the way on maximizing the usage of the LMS and other apps in your edtech stack.

Summary

Like we were told about computers entering the workplace decades ago, they’re only as smart as what we put into them. LMS are no different. And because of the interconnectedness of the edtech ecosystem, their effectiveness is fluidly evolving and requires the intention to yield results in the user experience we provide of both our students and the teachers tending to their growth.

For more on auditing and developing your tech stack see:

• Organizing a Modern Edtech Stack for Modern Pedagogy, Part I: The SIS 

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update. This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures, please see our Partner page.

The post Organizing a Modern Edtech Stack for Modern Pedagogy, Part II: The LMS appeared first on Getting Smart.

We’re amidst a paradigm shift the likes of which only hindsight will offer the most definition, but in the present, we know this much: according to the 2020 EdTech Top 40 report from LearnPlatform, an average school district accesses 1,055 edtech applications monthly. The likelihood of that number going down in the coming decade is slim at best. Especially considering the multitude of apps that teachers (and in more cases, students) surface for attending to specific learning opportunities or remediating missed or difficult to attain skills and concepts. Teachers benefit from these market innovations yet for the core stack of applications used by significant portions of the members of a learning community—those that would qualify as “enterprise-grade”—new names and approaches aren’t as prolific or diverse given the form and function restrictions dictated by state compliance and widespread usage demanding universal design across more personas. In short, a different assortment of math, reading or STEM applications can surface every week in a school’s list of apps teachers are using but a student information system (SIS) or learning management system (LMS) shift occurs much more rarely.

Aside from triage-grade changes you and your vendors made in the spring of 2020 to ensure a continuity of learning, if you haven’t evaluated your edtech stack recently, now is the time to do so.

To frame this conversation, we will continue to reference the model of the edtech hierarchy of needs seen in the diagram below:

The safe assumption is that every school or district in Texas is using one of the popular student information systems on the market such as PowerSchool, Skyward, and in some places, Infinite Campus, Alma or even the homegrown TxEIS. There are others in smaller numbers, but SIS, in general, isn’t as volatile as other categories of edtech. These enterprise tools share an overlap of features and regularly update their platforms for compliance issues or as demand increases for supporting emerging trends in teaching and learning.

Depending on the learning model and the needs of the teachers for serving the students in your community, one solution may function more optimally than another. What’s common, just like with cafeteria food, is that enterprise software developers can’t please all users without disappointing others.

Whether you’re satisfied that your SIS is keeping up, we cover five considerations for your vendor as you evaluate performance and how to improve upon things for the remainder of the 2020-2021 school year and beyond, no matter how instruction is delivered.

1: Can you access reporting data easily for local and state reporting?

Because compliance is the highest-stakes function of an SIS and getting it wrong could mean an impact to school funding, this has to be the first topic to address. Teachers may collect the most data the most frequently, but it’s the data coordinator, state reporting manager, or tech department with more responsibility to get this right. A well-designed state reporting toolset in the SIS is essential to keep up with the changing specifications coming out of the statehouse each school year, and it’s this same backend functionality generating reports from the total dataset to inform staffing decisions, intervention efficacy, or even recruiting efforts to boost enrollment. As banal as it may sound, more than any other dataset in your school, the one residing and sustained in your SIS is the source of truth. There are three things to evaluate as look to the quality of your SIS’s reporting functionality:

Data Entry

For all roles in your school, is it easy to enter information as soon you log in and commit to a task? Examples can include parents completing a registration form for a new school year (if applicable), a teacher taking an attendance record, or an administrator logging a discipline note after a referral from the classroom. Can all the different users in your care intuitively know how to access the right part of your system and provide the necessary information accurately? If not, can you determine if the issue is the responsibility of the vendor to design a better user interface or if it’s a professionalism/training issue? Either way, if you can’t gather the right information efficiently and accurately, doing it manually or following up will consume time that could be given elsewhere.

Data Management

When a family moves to a new house in the same district boundaries, is it easy to update that information? Are you able to verify it with real-time comparison to make sure the family is still in-district? What about when a student returning from an illness has to make up work that was logged in a prior grading period? Are your teachers able to modify those grades without requiring an administrator to unlock that finalized term? And when your state reporting coordinator is against a deadline and discovers a building-wide error that needs to be corrected, can she quickly batch update that field across multiple student roles with selectivity? Or will she have to download the file as a CSV and edit it manually in her spreadsheet tool of choice?

The results vary widely from one SIS vendor to another when it comes to robust data management. Some afford excellent control over batch operations internally and others allow for flexibility based on the roles and permissions determined by administrators. Coming to your vendor with a few scenarios that reflect real local and state use cases will show just how much work has been invested in the data management of your vendor’s platform and the implications on your current staff’s aptitude for making changes externally when necessary.

Data Extraction

There’s a local board meeting at the end of the week, and it’s coincidentally on the same day as that one peculiar monthly state report that’s due. The same staffer could be fielding the data needs for both outcomes and based on the two subtopics above, could be a matter of seconds or days, without hyperbole. Most of the dynamic range could be explained in the complexity of the requests, but also in the vendor’s design for exporting data out of the system to the specification demanded by the use case. Either way, the SIS’s reporting functions should have enough sophistication to reduce the amount of manual manipulation of information to preserve the integrity of the dataset, whether for sharing progress with the board or fulfilling reporting expectations from TEA.

2: Does the vendor support data interoperability across your stack (especially the LMS)?

According to the edtech advocate, Project Unicorn, “data interoperability is the seamless, secure, and controlled exchange of data between applications.” As we see in the basic model of the edtech stack above, foundational data either entered or managed in the SIS for certain outcomes may have originated in the learning management system or any other compliant/compatible apps we use in different classrooms, departments, or offices in our districts. Data interoperability promises to recover productivity from each and every position in our schools district-wide. But it has to be an elegant and sturdy ‘integration’ between platforms or apps. Much like with our instructional expectations, there must be adherence to standards and best practices for data interoperability to be successful. Not only does the aforementioned Project Unicorn provide technical assistance and advocacy for your needs, but they do so with the participation of other organizations in our field. A4L, IMS Global Standards, Ed-Fi and a number of third parties are invested in making data interoperability a priority. The end users can create even richer and more secure interoperability across their datasets by speaking up and demanding it as part of their contracts.

Shouldn’t my vendor build the integration?

If you lack the technical prowess in-house and don’t belong to a local consortium for sourcing those tasks, Project Unicorn’s Community Platform offers all educators the opportunity to “Book a Unicorn” and gain a consultant to help navigate the work. More often than not, that’s not required. Yet you may not feel initially like your vendor’s answers are sufficient to map data from app A to app B. If they are resistant or quick to quote a cost to you as dictated by your contract, underlining that ahead of its next renewal could be a negotiating advantage to retaining your school’s loyalty or gaining a new vendor eager to connect your SIS to the other important tools in your stack.

Talking about Integrations

Integrations between two platforms to achieve data interoperability require involvement and access beyond your control as an administrator. That’s a good thing. It keeps the structure of your bi-directional data flow more sound when things change. Knowing how to speak their language helps guide your intuition, even if it feels a bit beyond your purview as a school administrator, so you can frame it as such when you do. But do you know if your SIS vendor has public API (stands for “application programming interface) documentation for other companies to access for building an integration? Or do they rely more on a nightly syncs of data? To be clear, both have their place. But a vendor with API-based integrations is a more modern edtech vendor built on a more flexible and evergreen platform. It also may mean real-time data interoperability, meaning a special education director could make an update to a student’s IEP, and a new accommodation could be instantly available to the teacher in the SIS.

3: Are students and parents able to easily access their student and household data?

This hearkens back to the first question about data entry, but it’s more about providing clear expectations to the families you serve. A common complaint is that parents aren’t sure where to log in depending on the alert or instruction they receive from a school staffer due to the vast quantity of edtech vendors employed by the average school compared to the quality of user experience designed by those same vendors, optimized for each role.

Does your vendor offer a different view of the data based on that role? And are those views the right balance of data presented? Educators staring at reports, visualizations, and other presentations of diverse education data may be accustomed to interpreting the information no different than a pilot of an Airbus 380 consulting the instrument panel during a flight. But parents and students spend inordinate amounts of time sifting through too much information on their way to meeting expectations for school operations let alone academic progress.

If your vendor is going to support student and parent accounts, creating a quality user experience for families is first and foremost their responsibility. Even in how much freedom they give your staff for customizing the page is their responsibility. The irony here is that less is exponentially more. Less information. Less customization. More clarity. So if your vendor touts otherwise, it speaks of how much they value their own information and visual design acumen relative to you and your staff trained in another professional discipline. A good SIS vendor is confident in their screen designs for all roles in the learning community and adjusts with user feedback without sacrificing design principles.

4: Does the transcript feature align to the current state transcript?

For some educators, the transcript is the north star. It’s ultimately the product that reflects your leadership as evidenced by students’ growth and readiness for what comes next. For others, it’s an outdated credential in need of an overhaul. While that debate simmers, in the interim, school leaders need this cumulative credential to be accurate, self-generating, and easily accessible when graduates call back to ask for another copy to be sent in a secure way. Digital credentials have been displacing the notarized transcript of yesteryear but not wholesale. Parchment has the most influence in this space, but data is gathered automatically by way of a secure bit of data interoperability, funneling that student’s updated records into an intermediate database accessible to the postsecondary institution seeking to verify and then admit that student.

Therefore the SIS’s transcript functionality may seem ancillary to day-to-day features, but your ability to pass that data along securely and reliably with each transcript request, let alone augment it for school branding or reflecting accomplishments or salient information not required by the simple state template may be worth revisiting. And for a few years more, the ability to print the transcript in the high school front office on a security paper stock before sealing and sending is a legacy function worth keeping in your requirements if appropriate.

5: Does the grade book align with the one in your LMS, regardless of the grading approach?

This final consideration gives credence to the education sector’s predilection for a standalone LMS to work in conjunction with your foundational SIS. More related topics will be covered in a subsequent post on LMS guidance, but aside from a couple of other factors, alignment of grading policies, grading scales, and grade books can be a crucial decision-making bit of criteria when evaluating your SIS.

Firstly the data interoperability that covers the shift from logistical to instructional is extremely valuable. If your SIS and LMS are built out well, it leads from a student registering for a new school year, being assigned classes by guidance or advisory staffer, and seeing their demographic information reflected in user account provisioning for the LMS and associated third-party instructional apps on the roster for the first day of instruction. Making a simple diagram of that process and sharing it with both your SIS and LMS vendors can start that process on the technical side, which precedes the next level of interdependent details that reflect your philosophy as an edleader, the needs of your students, and the ability to support modern teaching and learning amongst your teaching staff.

What are your grading policies, how is that reflected in your grading scales, and how do teachers enter grades? Semantics aside, a good SIS should be able to support the traditional A-F grading scale or other simple variations on that same theme of flat, tiered relative mastery. But most SIS’s intending to stay relevant and help advance the profession towards best practices should offer support for more granular and specific feedback like we see in mastery- or competency-based approaches.

Does your SIS offer a standards-based grading system? How does it align with that in your LMS? Are the two compatible when uploading banks of learning targets, allow for efficient alignment of standards to instructional activities, and even generate rubrics for sharing with students and parents so they know what the activity will be focused upon?

This is likely the most nascent edge with a number of vendors still trying to catch up in how they visualize progress for a student across time, a teacher across the roster, and the administrator across cohorts or grade levels. Good vendors should show solid progress and adaptability so as to keep students from wondering how they’re doing on specific skills all the way through to earning a credit no matter how it’s awarded.

Summary

SIS vendors offer scads of other niceties to help sweeten the pot, but these core functions are what are underlying and most critical for a data solid foundation and more expansive opportunity to infuse other great tools into the learning experience design. Developing a positive relationship with your SIS vendor account representative and asking for insight into their product roadmap or to be included in one of their advisory panels is something more educators would benefit from, as well. And when you and your team have built consensus around needs using questions and thoughts such as those presented here, you can embark on a migration to a new platform that fits your needs significantly better.

For more, see:

• Closing the Digital Divide for Parents: A COVID-19 Story 
• The Two Most Important Things We Don’t Teach 

This blog is part of a rich resource set created by Texas Learning Exchange (TxLx), a project Getting Smart is working on in partnership with Altitude Learning and Getting Smart. To learn more about TxLx or access resources for school and district leaders, educators, and district teams visit TxLx.org

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update. This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations, and all other disclosures, please see our Partner page.

The post Organizing a Modern Edtech Stack for Modern Pedagogy, Part I: The SIS appeared first on Getting Smart.

According to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, there are 80 million people in the world forcibly displaced from their homes. For more than half, it means losing their country as well. That’s more than the total population of the southwest United States including California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas combined. 26 million of these people are refugees, and half of them are under the age of 18. In the greater Middle East, Syria, Afghanistan, and South Sudan account for nearly 12 million people who have lost their homes to conflict or persecution.

When Dr. Ilene Winokur, a lifelong learner, and educator moved from the US to the Middle East with her partner in 1984, she didn’t expect to make a career out of educating displaced people and their children. But that is what she has made her life’s mission. In fact, she was a refugee herself, fleeing to Spain in 1990 during the Kuwait war, and knows first hand the disruption and loss of making such a choice in the face of danger and unrest.

Yet in the midst of momentary exile herself, Ilene taught and later acted as principal of a private school before continuing to a university in Kuwait, where she became much more aware of the plight of refugees on the move. For the past five years, she has quietly and intently worked as a dutiful problem-solver for the brutal effects of these hard regimes and militarized occupations. She has focused upon the need for these displaced children to have access to a quality learning experience in order to avoid losing hope or, even worse, becoming potential recruits for the leaders of those movements. For three decades, Ilene has served as an education advocate and practitioner spanning the gamut from early childhood through higher education, teaching young learners and equipping practicing educators alike.

Her influence spread from those she served directly in Kuwait to other nations in the area as she built partnerships with locals who caught her passion for keeping our hearts and minds open to each other to find solutions after such disruption and chaos.

Staying involved even in retirement, Ilene is currently working with founders of community-based and refugee-focused organizations and also international NGOs serving the needs of 200,000 refugees in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp. With a resettlement rate of only 2-3%, Ilene has been working for some time with emerging leaders in the camp, as well as those who have been there since 2011, and some who have lived here even longer. The camp was founded in 1992 after the “Lost Boys of Sudan” were relocated to the region, a total of 20,000 displaced young people from the Second Sudanese Civil War and a story which reached the whole world with the 2003 film of the same name.

In short, she’s a difference-maker. Ilene has turned the dire outcome of a global refugee crisis into an opportunity for community building through education and leadership and has done so while staying connected to the education field at large. Her prior role as ISTE’s president of the Global Collaboration Network afforded her insight into the right technology for her work empowering students in refugee camps. She’s still working to get access to quality content and continue learning as these children and their guardians await the chance to return to their homes or relocate to a more stable location, even if it is in another country. Her collaborators even offer microloans and mentoring to empower women in the camps to start their own businesses and fend for themselves.

While US educators are being stressed to the limits with the pandemic disrupting face-to-face instruction and revealing how underprepared we’ve been as a field, Ilene and those she continues to mentor are innovating learning design for learners of all ages and building maker spaces and their families as well. With calm and humility, she offers that “…it’s an example of what education can be, especially in those situations with 80 million people on the move in refugee camps or resettled elsewhere and unable to return.”

For more, see:

• How Portable Learning Records Will Unlock Education and Employment Opportunities 
• 8 Tech Tools for Teachers 
• Academic Magnet High School is on a Mission of Excellence Through Creating Opportunity for All

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update.

The post Making a Difference: Education for Refugees appeared first on Getting Smart.

In 2010, when I left my prior career as a multimedia writer-producer to become an English teacher, I didn’t expect to have a visceral reaction to the state of education technology. I was accustomed to the sophistication and intricacies of creative software to churn out videos, graphics, publications, websites and other designed pieces. Then I logged into a student information system for the first time and thought I’d climbed in a time machine. It looked like an old FileMaker database. No. I wish it was that mature as a platform. I had to set up my gradebooks for each prep I was teaching and figure out why “attendance” wasn’t “attendance”, and that I should intuitively figure out to click on the “absence report” feature buried in a menu.

Later, I discovered that it was way easy for us teachers to accidentally delete grades, far too difficult to enter observations on a student’s formative progress, or even have to click layers deep to get to a parent’s phone number. As I struggled and started to wonder what else was out there, I saw what the competition offered as only moderately better.

Looking towards learning management systems, I was encouraged but my SIS provider wasn’t providing integrations. As a result, my rosters, assignments, grades and feedback weren’t translating. Inquiries both within my school’s technology department and with the vendors themselves were showing a glaring disconnect at the cost of the teacher’s fleeting time. I had no language for what the problem was yet but I couldn’t ignore such a productivity gap. My peers also shared in my frustration of double data entry, taking shots in the dark, and having myriad documents and spreadsheets to cover the gaps our vendors wouldn’t voluntarily close.

I started to learn about specifications and scripted “batchsync” operations for nightly updates between data silos to have more intelligent and focused conversations about it but was routinely met with “…that would be nice,” comments and a nearly audible “shrug” emoji from a peer or vendor contact.

Later, I spent five years in the field for Alma, representing the best user experience in SIS, and helping engineer solutions with integrations that gave data interoperability to schools and districts wanting the sort of performance I yearned for when I was a teacher and administrator. The technical standards powerhouse A4L, (formerly known as SIF) is another organization that understands this and has invested heavily into making this process more achievable with resources such as their Ecosystem Empowerment Guide to aid in the technological planning for districts with such prowess. So there is promise. The pieces are there.

If only I knew then what I know now: I needed Project Unicorn to advocate for such needs. The Innovate EDU initiative hadn’t launched at that point in my education career, but I have since found my “herd” and know their investment in raising awareness for the cause of high quality data interoperability for educators is more valuable than ever before.

As teachers gather themselves during the holiday break and prepare for 2021’s spring semester, edtech vendors can offer extraordinary value in this technical work by listening to what teachers need to serve their students optimally during this stressful time in our field. And teachers need the language and basic technical foundation to envision how the apps they’re using to impart knowledge and skills to their learners can and should “talk to each other”.

This is why we partnered with Project Unicorn to develop the Educator Toolkit. But we’re not stopping there. We will be hosting a webinar in a town hall format with three options for teachers, principals, instructional coaches, tech directors and other educators interested in closing this gap by learning how to assess local needs and approach decision makers with their requests for optimal data interoperability. Here is what will be covered from the Educator Toolkit:

• How to use the Project Unicorn resources for assessing need in your classroom, school and/or district
• How to frame up user stories from your practice to build a case around data interoperability
• Where to share your story locally, regionally and nationally for the benefit of fellow educators with similar needs

We will be offering webinars hosted by Project Unicorn to go through this toolkit in mid-February, so stay tuned to register for those.

So, if you’re feeling like a unicorn yourself, please share the word amongst your peers both locally and in your PLNs, and come ready to tell your stories of how better data interoperability will help teaching and learning for the spring semester and into the ‘21-’22 school year! Also, sign up for the Project Unicorn Newsletter at the bottom of the page at the link to receive updates for these upcoming events and other resources.

Download the Educator Toolkit.

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update. This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures, please see our Partner page.

The post Teachers Need Synchronized Edtech in 2021 More Than Ever appeared first on Getting Smart.