eScholar myTrack Expands Granular Access to Education Data

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/20/17

Education technology company eScholar has released a new edition of its cloud-based data management and reporting platform for student improvement. eScholar myTrack version 5.2 adds numerous updates from version 4, including more granular access for authorized users to data on specific students and features for managing meetings and goals for students.

myTrack works with the company's data warehouse to bring together data from a variety of education systems in use within the school or district to compile a multi-faceted profile on each student. The information in the profile may include the current year and longitudinal assessment, attendance, enrollment and course performance data. An early warning system evaluates current and historic data on attendance, behavior and course performance to help identify at-risk students. The program also allows educators to maintain notes about students whether meeting minutes or anecdotal information. Users can view and print comprehensive profile reports on each student. Multiple users can access and update that data, depending on their access level.

Among the enhancements to version 5.2 are tweaks to "Goals," recently introduced in myTrack to enable users to set personalized academic and behavioral goals for students one at a time or as a group, assign targets for goal attainment and set interventions to help them achieve their goals. The program also allows users to set parameters around the strategies, such as where the strategy will be used or how often progress will be checked.

A new "Meetings" feature lets educators create a meeting for a student. A "My Meetings" function shows the user a listing of all the meetings he or she has been invited to, and a "Student Profile - Meetings" tab displays summary information and past and future meetings for a given student.

The addition of a "Monitor" tab on student profiles allows teachers to identify problem areas and areas of strength for a specific student and add next steps (such as a goal, a note or inclusion in a group) for dealing with those.

"Roster Manager" and "User Manager" roles give people the ability to add and remove individual students to a roster.

"We designed myTrack to help schools and districts build a culture of collaboration focused on student goals," said Andrea Hartman, director of product management in charge of myTrack, in a press release. "All of the teachers, guidance counselors and administrators know exactly what the students' goals are, how they are progressing and which interventions are working."

"A lot of districts are looking to provide their teachers with more insight on how to help their students, teachers are looking for more ways to collaborate with others and everyone is trying to help student achieve their goals," added a company spokeswoman. "Rather than having multiple systems try to achieve this (and those systems likely don't 'talk' to each other), myTrack provides the platform to do it all."

The company said its software has been adopted in 15 states, including by Arlington Independent School District in Texas and the Virginia Department of Education.