LAPS News:
Los Alamos Public Schools has partnered with Rio Rancho and Farmington Districts to secure grant funding to modernize their IT architecture, opening opportunities for increased use of data to more effectively support educators, parents and students.
Through coordinated efforts, the three school districts will implement the Ed-Fi Data Standard and Technology Suite, giving teachers easy and secure access to student data in real time through a data dashboard.
With this dashboard, LAPS will be more easily able to address questions like, “Are students improving over time?” and “Are students on track for graduation, college and career?” The project will include data analytics and visualization to provide more useful information for teachers, principals, district office staff and the School Board.
The Ed-Fi Data Standard is a free and open data model that organizes data sets in the same way so that multiple source systems of data can be brought together. In addition to the data model, the Ed-Fi Alliance provides an Operational Data Store and an Application Programming Interface, which are tools to help bring all of the data together securely so that it can be analyzed in a user-friendly format. In addition to the technical implementation, LAPS is committed to working with teachers and administrators to improve data use in the classroom to better inform and enhance student-centered instruction.
Work is currently underway to scope and plan the project, to map current data sets to the Ed-Fi Data Standard and to train key LAPS staff members on the Ed-Fi Technology Suite. LAPS plans to begin piloting a data dashboard in the fall of 2019 and to roll out the data dashboard and analytics tools to the entire district in early 2020. The technical work for this project will be funded through a grant awarded by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.
“Thank you to the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation for supporting this important initiative,” Superintendent Kurt Steinhaus said. “We look forward to improving the use of data that better informs instruction and helps keep parents informed.”
