Lightspeed Systems® and Digital Promise have joined forces to provide participating Digital Promise League of Innovative School Districts a better way to track and monitor student-level digital engagement: the use of Lightspeed Digital Insight™. This award-winning data analytics tool enables schools to analyze the efficacy of their technology investments and identify those students at risk of falling through the cracks—all in real time Seven districts ranging in various sizes and locality participated in the project, including Virginia’s Chesapeake City Public Schools (CPS). CPS is a Lightspeed Systems customer and a member of the Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools. CPS agreed to include their aggregated, identified application usage and engagement data in the pilot study to help provide insight into the usage and engagement patterns of students in digital learning environments.
Identifiera de betalda verktyg som används av studenter i specifika kurser
CPS’s initial data analytics objective was to build an established data set from which they could begin making analysis and inform decision-making. “I think it is really important to have longitudinal data,” said Jeff Faust, CPS’s Chief Technology Innovation Officer. “To base a decision on what software is used in a month or two is not fair because there are a lot of tools that are not used in the first two months of school. Those same tools might become really important in the second semester. So, with Lightspeed Digital Insight, we wanted to get its agents pushed out to our student and staff devices as fast as possible and start collecting data. That was our original focus, but it is amazing how quickly our usage of the tool has become much bigger than that.”
With Lightspeed Digital Insight, we wanted to get its agents pushed out to our student and staff devices as fast as possible and start collecting data. That was our original focus, but it is amazing how quickly our usage of the tool has become much bigger than that.
CPS:s utökade vision för tillämpning och användning av dataanalys i utbildningen
Utföra en effektiv förändringsstrategi
As was the case for school districts across the country, video conferencing became an essential tool for delivering remote instruction for CPS. While the district’s leaders were very supportive of live instruction being delivered in this collaborative format, they did have security concerns around one video conferencing tool and are shifting users to a different platform in 2021–2022. To ease the transition and encourage early adoption of the new platform, the leadership team created dashboards within the customizable platform for each school that showed the usage comparisons for both tools. “Now that we have the data, we can share reports at our superintendent meetings as well as at our elementary, middle, and high school principal meetings that highlight who is doing a great job at embracing the new platform,” said Faust. “It has been a fun contest for them, and it has been an effective change management strategy because we have not put a lot of pressure on them to make the immediate switch. Instead, we are letting the data and application usage trends drive the change.
Nu när vi har data kan vi dela rapporter på våra föreståndarmöten såväl som på våra grund-, mellan- och gymnasierektorsmöten som visar vem som gör ett bra jobb med att ta till sig den nya plattformen.
Informera licens- och budgetbeslut
CPS’s district leaders are looking forward to having a year’s worth of data to help inform their licensing renewal and purchasing strategies. “I have to review every software license that comes across my desk,” said Faust. “Now, every time I get a request for software, I enter the license into Lightspeed Digital Insight. Once we have a full year of data, we will have a library of what we are missing right now, which is who has what software, who is paying for that software, and so on.” The district intends to use that information to identify opportunities such as buying districtwide licenses, as opposed to individual site licenses, or scaling down licensing to save money where it makes financial sense to do so.
“We want to move away from the practice of continuing to buy certain programs or tools because they have a strong legacy in education,” said Faust. “Instead, we are going to be asking more critical questions around our renewals and licensing, such as, ‘What’s the adoption like? What’s the effectiveness of the product? Is it helping our students and teachers achieve their goals?’ And those are tough questions to answer if you only have subjective and circumstantial information. Lightspeed Digital Insight provides us objective data we can use to inform and answer these questions.”
Faust har stämplat denna metod som kovägsmodellen, vilket i huvudsak innebär att du banar vägar där gångvägar redan finns istället för att försöka designa nya, unika stigar för att det behagar dig. Oundvikligen kommer människor att kringgå din väg och fortfarande gå över gräset. "Jag vill förnya och köpa mjukvara som vår personal använder eller kommer att använda, och det är effektivt", sa Faust. "Och jag vill ge den utbildning de behöver för att använda den. Men jag vill inte ge utbildning och tvinga våra lärare att använda en plattform eller ett verktyg bara för att vi köpte det.”
Spåra elevernas engagemang och närvaro
Measuring student engagement and attendance became an entirely new challenge during the 2020–2021 school year. In fall 2020, CPS implemented a hybrid learning model where students could choose to either attend class in-person or virtually. The district’s educators were also teaching in a dual-roster model, meaning they were delivering instruction to both students in the classroom and students at home simultaneously. What made the dual-roster model particularly difficult for teachers was the unpredictable nature in terms of student attendance. For example, a teacher may have prepared their lessons with the expectation that they would have 12 students in the classroom and four kids at home. In reality, they would unexpectedly have four kids show up in the classroom and 12 students attend virtually.
The CPS team began using Lightspeed Digital Insight engagement data as a secondary metric to monitor attendance and off-campus usage. “We had a lot of students who signed up for in-person instruction, but they were not showing up,” said Faust. “We were able to look at our analytics and validate that the students were joining virtually. We also began using the data to track the number of days students actually showed up in-person and then made adjustments based on that data. For example, we could look at the data and see that only 20% of students were on a particular campus on any given day. Based on that information, the principal could opt to bring more students back on campus because they weren’t at capacity.”
Vi kunde titta på vår analys och validera att eleverna gick med virtuellt. Vi kunde titta på data och se att endast 20% studenter var på ett visst campus en viss dag. Baserat på den informationen kunde rektorn välja att ta med fler studenter tillbaka till campus eftersom de inte hade kapacitet.
Avslöja olicensierade appar
CPS skapade instrumentpaneler för rektorer på varje skola för att hjälpa dem att implementera förändringshanteringsstrategier, spåra elevernas närvaro och övervaka apparna som används av deras elever. Varje huvudman har tillgång till en instrumentpanel som har de 10 mest licensierade och godkända apparna som används och de 10 bästa olicensierade apparna som används.
CPS leaders hope that visibility into unlicensed app usage will enable district and school leaders to draw some correlations between application usage and student performance and inform future decision-making and instructional strategies. For example, Lightspeed’s data shows that some classes are using a popular math program, but it is not licensed by CPS. “This particular tool is fun and engaging, but the question is whether it is actually effective or not,” said Faust. “That remains a bit of a gray area. Using Lightspeed Digital Insight, we now know which schools are using that tool. Correlation is not causation, but what if those are the same schools where the students are performing the best on their end-of-the-year assessments? If that’s the case, maybe we need to have a different conversation around that math tool. Tracking these kinds of ‘sneaky’ applications being used that we did not know about has been valuable for us.
Främja datasekretesskonversationer
CPS is leveraging the Lightspeed Digital Insight privacy alerts and application usage data to identify schools that have adopted and are actively using tools that do not meet the district’s privacy standards. Equipped with this knowledge, district leaders are able to notify school leaders of this usage and provide them with recommendations for other platforms that are very similar but comply with the district’s student data privacy policies.
Skapa en rådgivande datakommitté
För att främja fler samtal kring data och hur man omsätter sin analys i handling, bildade CPS en rådgivande datakommitté. Dessa kommittémedlemmar undersöker sina förfaranden för adoption och programvaruanskaffning i förhållande till deras applikationsanvändning och engagemangsdata och tar upp frågor som följande:
- Vad är det för programvara vi använder?
- Hur vet vi om dessa plattformar fungerar?
- Visste vi att detta verktyg eller plattform används?
Committee members are also working with the district’s instructional leaders to perform an audit of the free applications being used at CPS. They are also helping instructional leaders facilitate conversations regarding which free applications the district’s students and staff should or should not be using. “You cannot really begin to change a practice until you know what’s happening,” said Faust. “Through this data, we are getting the big picture view we need to establish and implement some effective strategies to change practices. It has also helped transform our culture by redefining what we need to ask and what awareness we need to have.
Viktiga insikter och nästa steg
CPS:s dataresa är verkligen imponerande. I framtiden avser distriktet att ytterligare integrera dataanalys för att påskynda deras programvarugodkännandeprocess och ytterligare stärka deras efterlevnadsinsatser på pedagognivå.
“We want to make the software acquisition process as painless as possible and take the bureaucracy out of it,” said Faust. “But we also want to make sure it is a good process, so we want to make sure we are asking mportant questions, such as, ‘What is the privacy policy? Did the vendor sign the student privacy pledge? Does the vendor have any standards that they are certified and compliant with?’ Those types of questions have been put at the top of our software approval process because we want our principals and teachers thinking about those things too. And we want them familiar with organizations like IMS Global Learning Consortium and doing some initial research to make sure the software they are requesting is safe. Having access to Lightspeed Digital Insight has really started some healthy conversation’s for us around data literacy and data awareness.
Info
Plats:
Chesapeake County, Virginia
Kund sedan:
2020
Studenter:
40,000
Betyg:
K-12
Enheter som används:
Chromebooks
Lösningar:
Dela på
Digital Promise arbetar i skärningspunkten mellan utbildningsledare, forskare och teknikutvecklare för att förbättra inlärningsmöjligheter för alla och överbrygga det digitala lärandegapet. För när alla elever har rättvis tillgång till teknik, när alla deltar och när alla lär sig, drar vi alla nytta av ett mer engagerat, informerat och rättvist samhälle.
Om Lightspeed Systems
Lightspeed Systems, med huvudkontor i Austin, Texas, är en ledande säkerhets- och effektivitetsplattform online för K – 12 -skolor. En beprövad partner för elevsäkerhet och engagemang, Lightspeed använder avancerad AI för att se och analysera elevaktivitet på webben. Lightspeed betjänar över 20 miljoner studenter i 38 länder och 28 000 skolor globalt.