| | DECEMBER 20238IN MY OPINION By Ann Mariano, Director of Technolog, Framingham Public SchoolsUNDERSTANDING STUDENT LEARNING LEVELS BY ANALYZING DATAIn the fall of 2019, the Framingham Massachusetts school district was starting to build out systems for data reporting. A new technology director was hired in January 2020, and her focus in previous roles had been on using data to improve student outcomes. She was hoping to use her prior knowledge to build data systems in Framingham. But six weeks into her tenure, the world shifted, schools closed, and 8,500 students and nearly 2,000 employees, who were all home, needed devices and learning management systems to survive the closure of schools. Technology shifted, and the tech team worked overtime to get devices out and teaching tools like Canvas, ScreenCastify, Zoom, and Google Meet onto everyone's screens.When the pandemic wound down and the school day returned to `normal,' the tech team had rolled out thousands of devices, distributed thousands of hotspots, trained thousands of students and teachers, and now had to shift the focus to getting everyone back to as normal a situation as possible. As students returned, it became apparent that the learning loss was severe and the behaviors were challenging. The district needed a way to objectively see how the students were performing.Because of the prior focus of the new technology director on data, she found that this would be the new focus of her world going forward. She needed to go back to building a data dashboard that would allow the district and building teams to see where students were and eventually find how the district could focus in on individual student outcomes.In the summer of 2022, Ann Mariano, the director of technology, and Nick Sweeney, the district data analyst, implemented a new data dashboard system by a company called AnalylticVue. In the months prior, Mariano and her team had issued an RFP to find a data system to meet the district's needs. The district had been using a free dashboard, Google DataStudio, which was incredibly flexible, to produce reports. But in the spring of 2022, word had reached Massachusetts technology directors that Google would not sign a data privacy agreement for Data Studio, and as a result, district staff had to stop using it almost immediately. The RFP for a new product was produced and shared. About ten responses come back. After a review by multiple staff members, AnalyticVue won the contract. The good news for Framingham was that most of their data exports had been written from their student information system (Aspen from Follett) to an SFTP server. Using the same exports to AnalyticVue allowed the district to be up and running with the dashboard in about six weeks.
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