The app creates an interactive tool for teachers to view:
- rosters of students that can be grouped and sorted in different ways including by homeroom, by demographic sub-groups (e.g. English Language Learner (ELL) status, special education status, etc), by performance, and by risk level
- profiles of students with attendance, behavioral and performance information over time
Teachers, school-level administrators, and district administrators might use this tool to see patterns in their classroom / schools and target specific interventions to support their students.
As an admin, I want to see which students are at risk and whether they are receiving necessary interventions.
As a teacher, I want to see which students are at risk and target interventions to these students.
As a teacher, I want to see how my students are doing both academically and behaviorally over time.
This is a Ruby on Rails app and uses a PostgreSQL database. See Code for America's "HowTo" on Rails for more information on deploying and maintaining apps using Rails: https://github.com/codeforamerica/howto/blob/master/Rails.md
To set up demo data after you clone the project, run
rake db:seed:demo
In addition to creating demo students, homerooms, and assessment results, this will create a demo educator login defined in db/seeds/demo/demo_educator.seeds.rb. The demo login has an email address of demo@example.com and the password demo-password.
Once you've created the demo data, start a local server by running rails s from the root of your project (i.e. in the folder called somerville-teacher-tool). When the local server is up and running, visit http://localhost:3000/ or and log in with your demo login information. You should see the roster view for your (demo) data. You can also access the demo site at https://somerville-teacher-tool-demo.herokuapp.com/.
If you're working with a real school district, you'll need flat files of the data you want to import to Student Insights.
Run an import task:
thor import:start
Use the --district flag to indicate your school district or charter organization. File formats and storage are configured by district in app/importers/settings/settings.rb.
So far, Student Insights can import CSV and JSON and can fetch data from AWS and SFTP. To import a new flat file type, you'll want to write a new data transformer: app/importers/data_transformers. To import from a new storage location, you'll want to write a new client: app/importers/clients.
This app uses the Rspec testing library. To run the test suite:
rspec
This app comes with a suggested pre-commit file that you can add to your git hooks. It will run the tests before any commits, so you can be sure any changes you add are kosher.
Add to your git hooks:
cp pre-commit .git/hooks/pre-commit
chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-commit
If you have a good reason to skip the test suite and commit straightaway:
git commit --no-verify
We are deploying this app on Heroku and you can, too. Be sure to set config variables for DEVISE_SECRET_KEY and SECRET_KEY_BASE in order for your app to deploy properly.
- August 2015: We iterated on the tool, tweaking and adding features prioritized by teachers, principals, and partners. We collaborated with KIPP NJ to build more robust data integration processes and demonstrated how this tool can be deployed more extensively to other districts (even having different SIS systems).
- July 2015: We piloted the app with teachers and reading coaches during Summer School. We observed the tool being used by teachers to create flexible groupings by math performance. We received a lot of great feedback on issues, functionalities, and features to work on. At Code for Boston, we held a collaborative coding session with a group of ~10 volunteers and built out the export CSV function.
- June 2015: We tested the app with more teachers now and building out the student profile features with the help of Code for SF and Code for Boston brigade volunteers.
- May 2015: We consider the app an alpha product now. Our focus is on building out the student profile feature and improving the roster view while testing working iterations with our teacher partners at Healey.
- April 2015: We had our first call with Healey teachers and principal to get feedback on a working prototype of the app using real data.
- March 2015: We started writing and testing functions to import data from Somerville's Student Information System and student assessment sources.
- February 2015: We met with the fantastic 5th grade teacher team at Healey throughout the month to learn about the challenges they face, see the current tools they use, and sketch paper prototypes together.
- January 2015: We kicked up this app during Build Week as a warm-up getting-to-know-you exercise. The initial product idea and subsequent feedback came from Stephanie Hirsch. This app drew from a single set of de-identified sample data from Excel to generate risk levels by homeroom, so it couldn't do anything useful in the wild. We said: "If this demo seems promising to stakeholders and early iterations prove useful, it could grow up over the course of the fellowship year."
This app could grow in several different ways.
- Sub-views: Create sub-views with more limited and focused access to data. These sub-views could be made available to others within the school community, including parents and students.
- After-school: Incorporate data about after-school programs.
- Interventions: Allow teachers to add interventions to the system and track how they impact student progress.
- Unique URLs: Can be generated to be viewed online at a later time by users with access.
- Printable PDFs: Can be exported of any view for teachers to print out.
Alex, Amir, and Mari from Code for America's Somerville Fellowship Team in collaboration with the City of Somerville and Somerville Public Schools --- and great support from the Code for SF and Code for Boston brigade volunteers!