Opportunities for Innovations that Support our Nation’s Education Investment

Cameron EvansNational and Chief Technology Officer,

U.S. Education

The Business of Schools

Opportunities for Innovations that Support our Nation’s Education Investment 1

Superintendents, principals and teachers are constantly exploring new methodologies for delivering instruction in the classroom by using a combination of changes in pedagogy and the incorporation of technology.

Now that Congress has passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to stimulate the economy through targeted public sector spending, educators may find themselves in a better position to employ transformational approaches to better prepare their students to meet the challenges of an information-based economy.

From an educator’s perspective, legislative changes enacted over the last decade have required education agencies at both the state and local levels to modernize their data collecting, reporting and analysis capabilities to meet accountability and reporting requirements. Policymakers and school officials are increasingly using this information to drive proactive changes in curriculum development, instructional delivery methodologies and the promotion of practices to improve student and school performance. New Response To Intervention (RTI) Systems, collaborative tools and ePortfolios are paving the way for formative assessment to be incorporated into the architecture of learning management and reporting systems. This approach to data-driven decision making is a result of two factors – advancements in technology that help turn data into information that can be used to effect positive change in the classroom, and lower acquisition costs of Information Technology (IT) solutions. As a result, educators and administrators increasingly seek comprehensive technology solutions capable of supporting longitudinal data collection and analysis, learning management systems, school administration personalized learning, instructional content authoring, collaboration and professional development.

The Challenge

How can economic stimulus funds improve the education

of your students?

Opportunities for Innovations that Support our Nation’s Education Investment 2

Teachers

Testing

Students

Reporting

Food Service

Resources/External Tools

CurriculumInstruction

FinanceHR/Payroll

Scheduling

Transportation

Case Workers

Email/Website

Special Ed

HR/Payroll

Attendance

Schools

Government

Local EducationAuthority

Parents

Students Students

Community

This diagram represents an example environment.

A centralized approach would allow for cost and time efficiencies.Today it is not uncommon for state departments of education and local school districts to have a variety of independent, decentralized systems to manage each distinct program. This often results in a large expenditure of time and money at the school level, rather than a centralized approach that would allow for cost and time efficiencies. The integration of technology into the fabric of schools and classrooms is increasing, but the strategy of how to maximize the impact is often disjointed. This is frequently the result of too many independent product acquisitions and implementations. The propagation of point solutions in turn puts further stress on the support and maintenance of the information technology environment, fosters inconsistent use of information and often impedes adequate technology training for educators and administrators. The following diagram depicts an example of a K-12 school district with independent school-based information technology systems.

Additionally, security standards, the protection of students and private information and policies such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) are an essential part of a comprehensive technology strategy. As schools and education agencies continue to expand the use of the Internet and electronic collaboration, a comprehensive information technology strategy is a very important part of creating a safe and secure environment for providing access to instructional and administrative information and resources.

Opportunities for Innovations that Support our Nation’s Education Investment 3

So, where do you start?Microsoft® has recognized that a holistic student and institutional-centric approach to optimizing both the learning and business environment is essential. The answer is not purchasing more technology products; rather it is recognizing the importance of instructional and operational key performance indicators and employing the appropriate solutions that enable optimizing goal obtainment. The following are examples of what many states and school districts are focusing on to better account for their overall effectiveness:

• Assessment results and the impact of 21st-century learning programs

• Graduation rates

• Improving instruction/student progress through growth models

• Professional development program planning and implementation

• Influencing readiness to learn

• Implementing standard space data and information architectures with the Schools Interoperability Framework

For many school systems, more effective integration of information that is used every day – student records, school operational data and instructional data – is a sound starting point. There is too much data that is not correlated in a way that busy educators and administrators can digest quickly in order to make instructional and business decisions, and processes are often wrought with paper and manual input requirements. Further, these systems are often treated as “islands of automation” offering very little in the way of interoperability. These factors have driven Microsoft to work with education customers with our Education Services Portfolio showcasing several examples and approaches – with a student-centric approach.

These solutions present a flexible approach for addressing the challenges that face education agencies, departments and programs. In the past, efforts to integrate services and administration have been stymied by the belief that these efforts required large-scale reorganization of departments and wholesale replacement of prior technology investments. Efforts were further hampered by the assumption that IT was a luxury, and not a necessity, in building the foundation for differentiated learning for students.

The answer is not purchasing more technology products; rather it is recognizing the importance of instructional and operational key performance indicators and employing the appropriate solutions that enable optimizing goal obtainment.

Opportunities for Innovations that Support our Nation’s Education Investment 4

Advances in information technology now, more than ever before, are enabling a personalized student and educator-centric approach to the management and delivery of instructional and administrative requirements which can:

• Provide a foundation for differentiated learning for students

• Enhance services for parents, teachers, students and administrators

• Simplify administrative processes of both State Education Agencies (SEA) and Local Education Agencies (LEA)

• Provide better analytics that directly support instructional and operational key performance indicators

• Leverage existing infrastructure investments

• Provide secure, role-based access to information

• Deliver improvements and efficiencies in operations, availability and maintenance of information systems

Based on our experience with the various LEA and SEAs, our offerings are a core part of Microsoft’s World Wide Education offering, a strategy for connecting people and systems, improving collaboration and providing for informed decision making. This allows agencies, departments and educational programs to empower educators by providing improved services to students while deeply involving parents and the community. This approach optimizes technology strategy and investments by aligning business and instructional needs to maximize results.

Using nonrecurring economic stimulus funding towards the implementation of an integrated, interoperable technology and data management environment meets many of the criteria defined in these programs. In turn, this approach will lead to a better allocation of resources, greater management efficiency and a more effective integration of technology into the process of teaching and learning. Educators who are empowered can transform teaching and personalize instruction, while administrators can achieve a better understanding and command of the programs and resources for which they have responsibility.

Opportunities for Innovations that Support our Nation’s Education Investment 5

Hosted Services

Analytics

Students

Operational data

SIS HR/Payroll Finance Transportation Food Service Other LOB

Curriculum andInstruction

Resources andExternal Tools

Analytics andReporting

AdminTools

Administrators Teachers Parents Community Principals

Enterprise Education Collaboration

Identity Management / SecurityRoles Users

Systems Integration

Education

HostedCollaboration

Historical data

The SolutionA Complete and Integrated Approach

To support the IT, instructional management and collaboration needs of K-12 education agencies, Microsoft® is offering a solution framework to assist school systems to achieve operational goals – to improve the educational experience of the student. At its core, it consists of one foundation component and three stand-alone or combined components:

• Identity Management (Foundation)

• Enterprise Education Collaboration

• Education Analytics

• Hosted Services

To the right is an example of a student-centric approach to maximize learning and

the business of schools.

Opportunities for Innovations that Support our Nation’s Education Investment 6

Think of Identity Management as a way to describe each of the individuals who are engaged with the school district: students, teachers, administrators, parents, community volunteers, service providers and businesses who participate in the learning and operations processes. An effective identity management solution uniquely identifies each user, assigns a role or roles to each user and manages their access to the education environment on a need to know basis.

Each individual is provided access to information and resources that are unique to him or her. For example, a teacher’s need to see certain types of information is different than a student’s; a principal’s need is different than that of a teacher. Parents and guardians have their own unique needs. In a 21st-century learning environment, more and more information and data are accessible via the Internet. Therefore, an identity management strategy becomes the foundation for all technologies applied to the education environment. The following lists some important questions related to identity management:

• To what categories of resources should people in different roles be granted access? For example, a teacher would be able to access their class records only, no one else’s, or parents should be able to access only their own children’s records, such as their grades or alerts when their child is absent from school.

• Who are the people who have a relationship with the agencies, caseworkers or other organizations involved with schools? In many circumstances, such as the development of Individual Education Plans (IEP), there is the involvement of many different people who have a vested interest in the student’s learning. For example, school counselors, special education advisors, principals and other teachers may all participate.

• How can the records today follow the student? If a student moves to another school, the information and records would be able to follow that child because they are uniquely identified.

• Can the principal correlate down to the classroom, teacher and student level to manage performance related to his/her school? How can they determine that their plans to improve are making an impact? Today, many of these reporting capabilities are extremely manual and paper-driven.

Identity Management

An identity management strategy becomes the foundation for all technologies applied to the education environment.

Opportunities for Innovations that Support our Nation’s Education Investment 7

A broadly based communicative and collaborative learning environment can be realized by adopting a district enterprise portal approach. K-12 school systems are finding that the implementation of such tools can provide for the creation and sharing of web sites, content, document libraries and impactful educational content and resources. This allows teachers, students, principals, parents and administrators to be empowered to:

• Collaborate, create and share information and resources

• Ease the management and administration of learning by providing common views of each functional area by those who have a need to know

• Achieve a greater level of understanding of assessment results

• Integrate learning and business processes (workflow, document management, records management, compliance, etc.)

• Provide for online and off-line communication and connectivity and for educators, administrators, students and parents as required

• Analyze results from longitudinal data systems, student information systems and other operational systems providing for past, current and predictive analysis

• Enable access feeds from weather, traffic, media and other environmental sources to notify students and parents of emergency situations, and to schedule changes

• Get access to information regardless of the user’s device (computer, mobile phone, e-mail, text message, alerts and/or RSS feeds)

Enterprise Education

CollaborationA broadly based communicative and collaborative learning environment can be realized by adopting a district enterprise portal approach.

Opportunities for Innovations that Support our Nation’s Education Investment 8

Education AnalyticsSchool systems must be able to evaluate and demonstrate their progress against performance goals. Through the Microsoft® Education Application Platform (EAP), a data analysis and data visualization solution, K-12 stakeholders can access and turn data into actionable information to assess the performance of teachers, students, programs and other aspects of the education process. Microsoft’s EAP provides educators with a comprehensive view of information that can be accessed and acted upon through a collaborative online community that connects individuals involved in teaching and learning, the administration of schools and educational agencies.

Our approach to education analytics helps to incorporate and integrate data from multiple sources (i.e., student information, learning management and business systems) into specialized repositories designed to provide easy-to-understand visualized reporting and analysis. This integrated architecture, when utilized correctly, can help to provide measurable improvements in student management, instructional assessment and accountability, compliance and business management. Examples include:

• Scorecards – Illustrate a collection of key performance indicators (KPIs) or a specific data point across multiple organizational units, such as schools or classes. Scorecards are used to easily access and compare the performance or status of organizational units.

• Dashboards – A collection of scorecards showing multiple data points that, when combined, provide a summary view of varying elements. The user has the capability to drill down on a specific data element to gain greater insight into overall organizational performance.

• Reports – Detailed views of data and information typically summarized into groupings of KPIs. Depending on a user’s role, reports may include drill-down capabilities allowing the user to disaggregate information from the dashboard view. For example, when a district level administrator wants to further understand a certain condition, such as declining attendance at a particular school, he or she can select that school’s attendance KPI on a scorecard, and then easily open and access a detailed attendance report for that specific school.

• Master Data Management (MDM) – As schools grow in size and complexity, their data becomes more distributed and difficult to manage. MDM addresses the problem of many systems with different contact addresses for the same student or employee, and improves the return on investment from enterprise systems. Master Data Services is a Master Data Management application that helps schools standardize and streamline their data from numerous independent and non-interoperable systems.

“Since NCLB, schools have learned they must use data to improve student learning for all students. As schools use data, they quickly learn that they must use more than student achievement data to understand what they can do differently to get better results.”

Victoria Bernhardt, Executive Director of Education for the Future Initiative

Opportunities for Innovations that Support our Nation’s Education Investment 9

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An emerging development in the world of software that is becoming rapidly adopted in education is called “hosted services” or “cloud computing.” Technology is no longer bounded by the traditional on-site IT department. Schools now have the option to leverage services like e-mail, collaboration and applications through a hosted technology environment managed by an off-site third party.

Microsoft’s offering includes the power of choice with Software-plus-Services. Institutions may choose to run some applications on-premises, or choose hosted services managed by Microsoft. You may implement a flexible combination of both software on-premises and a Microsoft-hosted solution, adjusting your deployment model dynamically as your IT needs grow and shift. Today our hosted environment includes enterprise-class e-mail, instant messaging, and the latest collaboration features for parents, teachers, students and staff. From our Live@edu program to Microsoft® Online, Microsoft has hosted services to meet the needs of your school.

For further information, please contact your local Microsoft Representative or call 888-237-8376.

For an online self-demonstration of our Education Center of Excellence, please visit www.k12portals.com to show some of the examples of our overall offerings.

Hosted Services

Technology is no longer bounded by the traditional on-site IT department.

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