Getting technological
In the upcoming months, students in South Berwyn School District 100 will find it a little more difficult to hide their homework grades and report cards from curious parents. The district will begin to post homework grades online, one of many things the district has begun to post online through different methods. District Technology Director Jim Kloss said the new technology is useful to help figure out where the district needs to focus to improve student achievement and help the district toward its vision of ranking in the top 25 percent of Illinois schools in state testing.
Dashboards
Current dashboards which display attendance records and school demographics are available to anyone through the district’s Web site, bsd100.org. Attendance records date back to the 2007-08 school year and can be compared to any of the following years including the current school year. The statistics can be filtered by grade, school, ethnicity, gender and whether the absence was excused or unexcused. Kloss said information is available to anyone who visits the Web site, but the student identification number is displayed instead of a student’s name. “If they’re not here, we can’t teach them,” Kloss said.
Homework grades, more dashboards to come
Parents of middle schoolers have started to see homework grades recorded online earlier this month, while third- through fifth-graders will have grades posted online beginning in March. Kloss said all nine grades from kindergarten through eighth grade will record grades online beginning in the 2010-11 school year. Additional dashboards being developed to display behavioral statistics, along with one to display data from previous years’ Illinois Standards Achievement Test and ThinkLink, a Web-based program run by Discovery Education. The program allows teachers to create tests in English and math and receive answers right away on how each student performed. Kloss said both dashboards should be active by the end of the school year.
New notification system
The district will begin to take the electronic route by using the SchoolMessenger notification system. “Instead of sending notes home, they can go out via e-mail, text message and by phone,” Kloss said. The announcements, which are scheduled to begin in the spring, can be as wide-ranging as district-wide to announce a school closing or emergency to specific classes or groups that have a field trip or sports practice.
Going green
The district has decreased its paper usage by having School Board members use laptop computers during meetings instead of using paper agendas, and the district has started posting report cards online. The two middle schools in the district have their report card grades posted online and sent home, and the district is working on putting grade school students’ report cards online this year.
