August 2004 — Applications
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Database System Helps Keep Everyone Informed in Rural Vermont School District
Educating on a Local Level
The Addison school district has established its own profiles for local achievement by grade and subject. We believe that if we stay on track with the local profiles, we will also stay on track with many of the standardized tests at the state and national levels. As the system exists now, it has tremendous utility to analyze and chart education progress on many levels. Since all the data exists in a central database, we can quickly export from FileMaker Pro directly to Excel spreadsheets. We can then chart and graph the progress from one year to the next or compare the achievement on standardized tests to local educational profile objectives. In the event that we find discrepancies among the comparisons of local and standardized test results, we can adjust our educational emphasis accordingly.
The database is designed to accommodate fields for as many as 90 separate objectives for each area of the curriculum. For instance, in the area of reading, we can compare results for reading strategy, reading comprehension, writing dimensions, writing conventions, language receptivity and expression, as well as knowledge and engagement. In its entirety, the system consists of nine relational databases with more than 64,000 records.
Teaching the Teachers
Since the look and feel of the database maps intuitively to the paper-based system that teachers have already used, training affords us the opportunity to educate not so much on how to use the database, but on how to evaluate students' expertise. This is particularly helpful in areas like literacy, which can be less objective than testing students' mathematical abilities. Along with evaluation criteria, we have produced a handbook to augment the system.
Spreading the Word
As our system became more successful with parents, teachers and administrations in the district, word quickly spread to other districts in the area. Several of these local school districts are now starting to roll out their own student management systems based on our database. Addison charges for the software and for a small portion of my time consulting to the other districts in order to recoup some of the costs from my efforts developing the system.
Four years ago, this system began as a way to track educational progress for the Addison school district. Now, it is helping teachers, parents and administrators find new ways to collaborate in order to improve the education of students not only in this district, but also throughout our region of Vermont.
— Bob Owens, Ed Tech Coordinator, Addison Northwest Supervisory Union
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