Matt Houston and his colleagues in Volusia County Schools, were hungry for timely insights that would empower educators and improve students’ educational experiences and outcomes. They spent far too much of their time digging for data and attempting to piece it together despite varying sources and formats. By the time they could produce reports, the data was weeks, or months old. It simply wasn’t sustainable. They went searching for a better way and discovered Ed-Fi.
Kudos to our partners in Volusia County for actively seeking out a solution— knowing the importance of this issue and that the right technology had to be out there. Over the past year, they have worked diligently to map their data to the Ed-Fi Data Standard and to implement the Ed-Fi ODS/API. Importantly, they trained their district’s educators on how to take full advantage of the benefits of interoperability.
Representatives from Volusia County attended the Ed-Fi Summit for the first time in 2017, participated in an Ed-Fi special interest group tackling the issue of controlled vocabularies, and have immersed themselves in the community. As Matt shares in this video, “When your district is smoothly rolling, looking at data, your teachers have access to everything immediately at their fingertips… it’s invaluable.” We couldn’t agree more. Here’s to getting data into the hands of educators.