And so it begins…
I’m a math guy. I’ve been a high school math teacher for nearly 20 years and have taught statistics units and entire courses dedicated to statistics, including AP Statistics. But even with all this experience, when asked to review externally administered test results or look over a spreadsheet and analyze the results of multiple assessments, my eyes started to glaze over. I kept saying to myself, there has got to be a better way.
I’ve always held the belief that statistics should be the pinnacle of high school math courses, not calculus (not a popular opinion in most math departments). But, with data infiltrating our lives daily, there needs to be more data literacy with our students, with teachers, and with the population at large.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve had two different friends talk to me about the work they do with data – one who works with juvenile justice data and one who works with educational data. Both suggested that I look into data dashboards. Data dashboards are nothing new in the business world, but are gaining new attention at the moment as a useful educational tool.
As I started looking into data dashboards, my mind started racing. There are so many ways that they can be incorporated into the classroom. My first thought is that it would be great for students to have a better understanding on where they stand with their grades and how other data, like attendance, tardiness, homework completion, etc all factor into grades. And then I started thinking about my time as a teacher and all the information that I held in my head about my students that may not have seemed to have been based on data, but actually was. I just didn’t have the time to figure out how to quantify it all.
This has now become my passion. I stepped out of the classroom to build these tools and launch this business, because I know there is something here.
Teachers need help. We’re buried by our day to day work. We’re buried by all the data that we want and need to collect as well as the data our admin want us to collect. But the harsh reality is that all of it just sits there, often unused or only analyzed once a year during inservice.
I’m here to help. I want to help simplify your student data. I want to help you visualize your student data. I want you to utilize your student data. I want to help you datafy your classroom.
