Data+and+Technology

Data and Technology

National Expert - Chris Thorn Eagle County Schools - Mike Gass, Executive Director Student Services; Jason Butters, Information Systems Manager; Stan Lake Information Technology Manager

As a follow up to the paper I sent you, I've been taking a more detailed look at the new offerings Microsoft is describing as a part of the extended features of SharePoint 2010. There is some more generic descriptive material at their Education Analytics page.

What is interesting is this brand new report on that page - Student Individualized Growth Model and Assessment - that uses the new Microsoft Decision Support tools in SharePoint 2010 with a package developed by ChoiceP20. One thing that is particularly interesting is that this white paper explicitly leverages the Colorado Growth Model. I'm not endorsing any of these products, but I do think it is a great vehicle for taking a look at one concrete strategy for deploying pretty sophisticated decision support resources across the district.

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In anticipation of my visit, I thought I'd post a couple of links for the sort of things I follow to keep up with trends in IT.


 * First** - I like to follow both technical and more applied sources on collaboration and participatory design. LMS or IMS systems are examples of more narrowly purposed online collaborative systems. This is a mix research, non-profit, and commercial resources.

Student Data Trackers: An NSF-funded project going on here at UW-Madison. Currently runs on the iTouch/iPhone but is soon to be ported to the Android. It is an example of a locally developed end user application that was co-designed with teams of end users (teachers and instructional support staff) in schools. They have a [|recent page] on resources in this area that is pretty good.

Matt Koehler at MSU is doing lots of work around Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). It can be really useful to position technology choices in a scholarly environment to help instructional staff and leadership understand how innovations fit into the instructional world.

We have a local group called ComETS (Community of Educational Technology Support at UW-Madison). I like the quality of the work, but the important point is that the group includes instructional technology and media specialist from the surrounding districts as well as partners from around the world. If you have that sort of thing available to you, it provides a nice on ramp for individual staff members looking for a supportive community.

Visual Complexity is probably the single best resource for thinking about how to display complex data. It links to both commercial and open source resources in this area.

Museum 2.0 is one of the best blogs I know on designing participatory environments. Many developers are looking at this sort of approach for redesigning technologies for education.


 * Second** - I track some major industry blogs/RSS feeds to make sure I know who is getting bought by whom. That's more of a risk management strategy. The things I track are identity management, data governance, data quality, collaboration, and content management. Those topics are key to any enterprise strategy.

I think Information Management magazines is one of the best resources around for helping to explain complex IT, data management, and data governance issues to non-technical people. I have used resources from that publication many times in both policy and scholarly settings.

CMS Watch Blog is a real leader on current issues around the content management and collaboration technologies. They also have great advice around lots of technology planning and governance issues.

Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blogs are also great resources for important industry trends.

Burton Group Collaboration and Content blog is the other major resource in this space.


 * Third** - I follow the folks who seem to have an ear in Washington, D.C. There are several groups who dominate the discussion around technology and data use in education. The main groups are all link to the DCQ - CCSSO, NGA, Achieve, Ed Trust, etc.

The Data Quality Campaign is the loudest voice in DC and in many state offices around the country. There most recent list of 10 State Actions is completely in line with federal education reform policies. I always pay attention to what's going on here. In addition, their resource pages are really good stuff.

Ed Sector (tied in with the DQC) has some very particular posts on the //Design Principles for Smarter Data Systems// that I think are right on. This is the first post in a series of five that hit all of the major topics.