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Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

3 ways our district avoids data overload

Schools give many tests throughout the year to identify students’ skills and gaps in their learning, including universal screening, diagnostic, formative, interim, and summative assessments. These tests generate a huge amount of data meant to guide instruction—but all of this information can be overwhelming if teachers don’t have an easy way to process it.

There is such a thing as having too much data. If teachers have to sort through an abundance of data to figure out what their students need, and if they don’t know which data points they should focus on to achieve the greatest impact on learning, then they won’t use data to inform their instruction—and the money invested in data analysis and reporting tools will have been largely wasted.

That used to be our experience in California’s Buena Park School District, which serves nearly 5,000 students in grades K-8. We had a great data tool, but teachers weren’t using it. After making a few simple changes, however, we saw our teachers’ use of data begin to skyrocket.…Read More

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6 steps for using data to improve instruction

Research suggests that when principals work directly with teachers in explaining how and why they should use data to improve their instructional practices, the effect on student achievement is more than twice as powerful as any other leadership dimension.

Clearly, K-12 leaders hold the keys to data-driven improvement. And if they want to lead this practice effectively in their schools, they need to understand how to use data as a leadership tool.
According to Datrow, Park, and Wohlstetter, there are six key strategies that performance-driven schools and districts should follow if they want to use data to produce significant achievement gains. Let’s explore them.

1. Lay the foundation.…Read More

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Want to put your data into action? Here’s how!

Classroom assessments represented a nearly $1.6 billion market in 2017, and that market is expected to grow by 30 percent through 2020. In fact, classroom assessment now makes up a majority of the testing market, surpassing state testing.

The benefit of formative assessments

Formative assessments are one of the most widely used types of classroom assessments. A key benefit is that formative assessment practices have the potential to increase student learning. With formative assessments, teachers check for students’ understanding during instruction—rather than at the end of a unit or course—and then adjust their instruction accordingly.…Read More

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3 ways our school uses data to drive instruction

For the last six years, data has been part of our “secret sauce” here at Bronson Elementary School in Bronson, Fla. Many of our students come from economically disadvantaged homes so we know we need to continually work harder than most schools to help our students succeed academically—and data helps us do this.

Our teachers and administrators are constantly looking at data trends—including data over periods of time, across grade levels, and for individual teachers and subgroups of students—to help drive instruction and student achievement. Specifically, Bronson uses schoolwide data to determine core instructional needs and proficiency targets. We use grade-level data for insight into groups for intervention, classroom data to support differentiation in the classroom and teacher effectiveness goals, and student data to identify intervention needs and IEP goals.

The data we analyze is collected from various sources, including the Florida Standards Assessment (FSA) in reading and math for grades 3-5 and the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test Science for grade 5. We also use diagnostic data that we collect three times a year using the i-Ready program for reading and math in grades K-5.…Read More

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Are K-12 data systems ready for AI?

As educators who love technology, we can barely contain our enthusiasm for the potential applications of artificial intelligence (AI). But AI requires massive amounts of data, so before jumping on the AI bandwagon we need to:

  • reflect on the kinds of data that would make teaching more effective and improve learning outcomes;
  • consider the systems that will allow us to collect and manage the data; and
  • create processes to share and analyze the data.

Most districts do not yet have the foundation to make the leap to AI (other than what is already embedded in the apps and programs they’re currently using). Schools still exhibit a lack of maturity around data collection that should make us cautious about AI. There are also algorithmic bias and equity issues that need to be resolved before we move to wide-scale AI adoption. For most districts, spending money on AI over the next three to five years would be money down the drain. The ecosystems to support AI implementation are simply not yet in place in most schools and districts.

5 essential questions to test your district’s AI readiness…Read More

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How 5 states are rocking education data

States are on the right path when it comes to using real-time education data to inform teaching and learning, but they should continue taking critical steps to improve data use, according to a new report.

The Data Quality Campaign’s (DQC) Show Me the Data 2017 report highlights strides made by states in their education data reporting and ways they can make their report cards clearer and more useful so that parents, educators, community members, and policymakers have the information they need to make decisions that help all students excel.

The report cards in the report help show if schools are serving students equitably, and the information, including test scores and postsecondary enrollment, can give school leaders a look at school performance and pinpoint existing inequities.…Read More

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Fascinating: Can analytics help schools hire the best teachers?

As K-12 school administrators know, finding the best talent for their schools is becoming more challenging, with fewer people entering the teaching profession and more teachers retiring. With no near-term end in sight, hiring and retaining great teachers may be problematic for years to come.

While the teacher shortage used to be confined to rural areas, it now is a nationwide problem impacting nearly every U.S. school district. For some districts, administrators have trouble filling specialized teaching positions, while other districts find it difficult to fill all positions.

According to a recent report by the Learning Policy Institute, if supply trends persist at these current lows, the annual shortfall could grow to 112,000 teachers by 2018.…Read More

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District Technology Specialist: These are the critical success factors for 1:1

At Banks County Schools, a rural school district in the mountains of northeast Georgia, it feels like we’re at the end and also the beginning of a very exciting journey. With around 2,850 students in pre-k to grade 12, technology plays an increasingly important role in learning outcomes across all age groups.

While we launched a district-wide 1:1 initiative this year, our journey actually began four years ago when we kicked off discussions about supplementing our aging hardware which, at the time, consisted solely of desktop and laptop PCs. With the full backing of our board, we introduced five iPad carts that teachers had to apply to use.

As classroom technology increased, these five carts quickly grew into 16 and discussions evolved into the viability of rolling out a full 1:1 program.…Read More

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4 reasons data is crucial for personalized learning

Data provides a fuller picture of students’ performance with information such as participation, assessments, and growth on skills over time. Having this greater understanding of students’ strengths and where they need to grow equips students to have more ownership over their learning.

Data also enables students to work on a skill or content until they have mastered it, broadening their learning beyond time spent in the classroom.

As more and more schools across the nation adopt visions for personalized learning, the nonprofit Data Quality Campaign has produced new graphical resources that illustrate that data makes personalized learning possible, no matter the strategy.…Read More

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Experts: 5 elements for a winning, data-informed district

Data, data, data. Most school leaders know how important data is to every part of a district’s operations, from bus routes to PD and student achievement. But sometimes, capturing and interpreting that data proves challenging.

Still, when data is collected and used to drive transformational change in a district, the results are nothing short of eye-opening.

During an ISTE 2017 session from eSchool Media and BrightBytes, a panel of ed-tech experts discussed how the ability to collect, access and easily interpret data has allowed them to personalize student learning and track achievement.…Read More

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