#codeisland

See what we've been up to from January through June!

Hey Rhode Island. It’s been awhile. Sorry. We’ve been busy.

Since it’s been a bit since we last posted, let's step back and take a look at where we’re at in the scope of this year. Here’s the timeline.

January: Training at CfA

February: Residency in RI. Meet EVERYONE in RI Education (K-12, Adult Education, Gov’t, Libraries). Learn about on-going initiatives and current challenges.

March - August: We continually loop through the following process:  (1) Synthesize findings and identify an area where we can help.  (2) Build prototype.  (3) Review prototype with potential users and see what they think (4) If users like the prototype, take their feedback and build an app. If users don’t like the prototype. Abandon the project (i.e. don’t waste/time money on it) (5) Make sure the app is sustainable and/or that it has an owner for post-fellowship.

September: Final refinement of apps and presentation at CfA Summit

October: Promote apps and begin hand-off to RI

November: Enact sustainability plan and final app hand-off to RI

(Our fellow fellows in Lexington made an awesome diagram of the timeline that explains this much more visually.)

With that said, in March and early April we returned to CfA headquarters in San Francisco to review our February interviews and start identifying areas where we could help empower RI educators. Initially, we came up with a staggering 180+ ideas that we had to narrow down. By early April, we had narrowed down to just six and built out some prototypes/designs.

That brings us to mid-April. Andrew and Anna-Marie returned to the Hope State to run focus groups around these ideas, but also to meet with groups that we weren’t able to chat with in February. (P.S. Thanks so much to everyone that came to the focus groups and gave their earnest feedback! It’s helped a ton!). By the end of the visit, we were still at six idea areas, but had removed those not well received and added a couple that we hadn’t considered before.

Now that we're settled back into CfA home base in San Francisco, we've been fervently reviewing our notes and research. The challenges we heard about during February are both broad and far reaching, so we've been trying to narrow our scope to areas we can have an impact in a within the year. Here are some of the high level thoughts that we've been using to direct our brainstorming:

Libraries: How can libraries better serve the needs of their community?

Grants/Budgets: What tools and processes are available to help schools manage and plan their finances (based on data driven decision making)? What techniques and strategies are helpful to winning grants?

Digital Divide: What can be done to help those on "the wrong side" of it? What are better ways to share knowledge and help develop digital skill sets, for both kids and adults? What digital skills do people need to survive in the modern world?

Connections: How can we help different departments/organizations/people work together within the education sphere? How can RIDE and schools better collaborate or share data? How can schools better communicate with parents?

While we've started with these broad questions, our ideas have tended to be more specific. Here's our process for capturing and prioritizing them:

Define a broad problem area (example: Libraries)

Jot down problem/opportunity statements (example: "Libraries can better engage their communities")

Under the problem/opportunity statement, list solution statements ("Libraries can act as a meeting place for facilitating mentoring and tutoring, but they need a way to arrange those meetings (match making for tutoring, etc.)")

For each solution statement rate the following factors on a 1 (low) to 3 (high) scale: team member interest, reusability, inclusivity, impact, feasibility, strengthens gov't/community relationships, increases capacity, contributes to civic tech movement, improves transparency, is there sponsorship. Not all factors are equal, so the ratings for each category are weighted based on how important the team feels they are.

See which solution statements scored the highest.

Prototype the high scoring ones.

During our last couple days in RI, we had the opportunity to visit RIDE (RI Department of Education) to learn more about the initiatives going on and to better understand the "who's who" of the organization.

We were able to touch base with the following people.

Holly Walsh: Holly (pictured with us above) helped guide us through who we should meet with inside of RIDE. But aside from that, she also gave us a very helpful timeline of the State's education initiatives, providing some great background to meetings we had through the month. Additionally, Holly is involved in enabling technology use in the classroom, improving proficiency-based learning, and more.

Nancy Labonte: Adult education specialist with the Office of Multiple Pathways. This office serves a lot of out-of-school youth, the ESOL population, and retirees that have trouble with digital literacy or are in need of core job skills.

Sarah Anderson: Transformation Specialist at RIDE. Deals with troubled schools and has created a dashboard to track progress and metrics surrounding them.

Jan Mermin: The program manager of 21st Century Community Learning Centers. Jan's work revolves around before/after school programs that help students stay engaged and enriched.

Michael Ferry, Peg Votta, and Mario Goncalves: The Data & Analysis team at RIDE handles the intake and digestion of education data. They have also worked in the space of making sure that there is an Instructional Management System (IMS) that works for all the schools in the State.

ONIS Team (pictured below): The Office of Network and Information Services is the in-house software development team and coordinates with IT vendors on behalf of RIDE. They manage over 40 apps and are very hard at work with future software initiatives that help enable schools, administrators, and folks within RIDE itself.

We're very grateful to the folks at RIDE for sharing insights into what they are working on and helping to connect many dots for us. We looking forward to working together.