School data rooms have for a long time been a popular tool used in schools to show and evaluate the progress of students. They typically consist of charts and white boards which display academic data for teachers to look at. The concept is to allow teacher teams and administrative personnel to to examine and discuss the performance of students in a co-operative way.
However, the issue with these data displays is that they could violate FERPA guidelines. These spaces can be used to humiliate students in front of their peers or to humiliate them in public. This shouldn’t be happening in schools.
Teachers also have difficulty to track progress of students using these data walls especially when there are several grades and subjects being monitored. Teachers can tackle complicated issues much easier using a digital platform which allows them to filter by individual assignments, trends and date ranges. They can also go deeper into classrooms and student cohorts.
In addition, a digital solution usually comes with an annotation tool that allows users to add personal notes to any document stored within it. This is a wonderful feature for keeping in mind tasks, questions and answers threads and document uploads. It would be great to have the ability to grant permissions to documents, folders, and activities based on roles, document and folder levels or activities.
As schools are driven to focus on instruction based on data and assessment, it is vital that they locate tools that aid them in reviewing and discussing the data in a more collaborative manner. Schools can make an informed choice by selecting a digital solution that offers the right combination of features that meet the needs of educators.