GAT Meeting - 2020-05-14

Owned by Ann Su
Last updated: Jun 17, 2020 by Chris Moffatt (Deactivated)
4 min read

Agenda

  1. Covid-19 Response & Ed-Fi
    1. Check-in with GAT members on current status and community priorities
    2. Fix-It Fridays: Overview and discussion on an initiative the Alliance is activating the community around Covid-19 response
  2. Governance Activities
    1. GAT Review of 2 Proposed Ed-Fi RFC’s
    2. Proposed Adjustments to the Ed-Fi Certification Program
    3. Quarterly review of governance metrics
    4. Standing GAT agenda item: Actions being taken to improve vendor adoption
  3. Show-and-tell
    1. Overview of recent Ed-Fi Roadmap releases and contributions to the Ed-Fi Exchange

Link to meeting PPT

Participation

Members:

Support:

Meeting Minutes

Refer to the meeting PPT for additional details on the meeting minutes and discussions.

Previous meeting minutes can be found here.

When available, meeting minutes should be read, and any corrections sent to Chris.

Agenda Item #1: Covid-19 Response & Ed-Fi

Gathering input on priorities from GAT members

The GAT meeting began with a check-in with GAT members on current status and community priorities.  Key priorities included:

  1. TEA - Ed-prep programs are focusing on planning and support for getting teachers into classrooms next year – ensuring certifications and reviewing prior year numbers and trends for teacher positions.
  2. Rio Rancho – switched quickly to digital learning. Focus now is on planning for next year. Some students will be fully remote, some blended remote and in class. Working toward getting Internet access to all students and staff for home use. A challenge is how to institutionalize the online approach.
  3. Wisconsin is getting lots of requests for data. They are collecting information on how the LEAs are doing with regard to digital access, strategies for teaching lower grades. Working to get HHS and immunization data to LEAs.
  4. Boston – distributed 22,000 chrome books (55,000 students overall). Also distributing hot spots. Remote learning will likely be a key strategy for the next year. Demand for data and analysis (interpretations) has skyrocketed, as has the need for interoperability. Having Ed-Fi in place has been a big win for them in this regard. They are pushing standards for all instructional software.  They are using INNIVE (remote learning dashboard of usage++) to pull data on logins, length of sessions, populations who log in, access challenges, etc.
  5. Illuminate – trying to position to best assist districts with start of school – ensuring products are fully accessible/usable to support new school year. Districts have online assessments but still administering them with paper/pencil.

Fix-It Fridays: Overview and discussion on an initiative the Alliance is activating the community around Covid-19 response.

The Alliance has organized a team to identify and quickly address the key needs created by the current situation with COVID-19. Eric leads this work. It is fashioned after Make-over Mondays https://www.makeovermonday.co.uk/ and is being called Fix-it Fridays.

Ed-Fi Community Members & Staff will identify technical challenges that could be solved using an agile, project-based focus of technical expertise as follows:

  • Technical challenges must apply to more than one school district. 
  • Ed-Fi technical team will develop challenges into discreet projects (including primary goal, tasks and game plan) that can be addressed within a short time period. 
  • Possible Future Features 
    • The project will present findings, solutions, progress and ideas on Fridays during an Ed-Fi Community Meet Up. 
    • Community Meet Ups will be open to any Ed-Fi Community member, will be hosted from 2-3pm each Friday. Agenda to be posted on Slack on Friday mornings. 

A big theme of our research with the community was that there is a lot of activity – shifting activity – to monitor the student home learning environment, but that activity is not well-coordinated and is falling heavily on teachers.

The product/outcome for “Project 1” may be a tracking and visualization mechanism for the most important school disruption-related data, with teacher and administrator interfaces for visualization, sharing, and easier input. 

Discussion on this approach included:

  1. It would be helpful to have a repository to place all of the scattered data that teachers need for next fall – such as online usage data, device availability and connection data, services the students receive, which services are remote, and which are in person.
  2. Consider teacher data – their approach to teaching in the current reality, their tech ability and environment, their SEL state.
  3. Be sure to get input from a big enough sample of teachers/administrators to ensure we are addressing the right issues.
  4. Remember to have a voice representing the SPED students and teachers.
  5. Equity is a big issue now – ELL, Native Americans, and SPED.
  6. Connecting to community efforts for public health, wellness – who needs what service – no place to capture this data now – this could become Project 2 of this endeavor.

Call to Action:

Provide names and contacts of SMEs - people that represent the building-level needs - and send to Eric.  They will be invited to the Friday sessions. GAT is welcome to attend as well.

Agenda Item #2: Governance Activities

Topic deferred

Agenda Item #3: Show-and-tell

Topic deferred

Action Items:

  • Eric to provide description of the ask for Fix-it Friday participants

Action items from 3-12-2020 GAT:

  • Establish as a standing GAT agenda item the topic of actions being taken to improve vendor adoption and support.
  • Future topic: CEDS (as an open source community) and Ed-Fi communication, coordination and alignment.

Next meeting: June 18, 2020 at noon ET