OK Google, What Am I Doing Today?
BY ZACH VANDER VEEN /School Administrator, May 2020

Zach Vander Veen, vice president of an education technology firm, relies on his Google Home device to track his appointments, messages and phone calls.

In my kitchen, I have a Google Home device. After pouring my coffee, I ask it what I’m doing for the day. Google answers with not only my schedule but tells me the weather, news, the fact that my favorite band plays next Friday, and traffic heading south on I-75 is a mess so take the scenic route.

I’m simplifying a bit, but what Google does is query my calendar, my travel route to work, weather.com and NPR to help me through the day. Google compiles third-party in-formation (for example, NPR) and first-party information (Google Calendar) to create a body of practical knowledge for me to use.

Fast and simple. The assist I need in my everyday life.

Missing an Assist

A typical day for a school administrator involves making hundreds of decisions quickly and efficiently, often without the help of Google.

We may start the day with an approval process for staff professional development (will this PD be a growth experience for this particular teacher?). A road closure means half of the buses will arrive late (do we adjust the daily schedule?). The internet drops out during testing (what’s the backup plan?). A newly issued report of state test scores carries a particularly poor showing of our students with disabilities (do we need to change curriculum, groupings, support staff, etc.?).

We may need to respond to the needs of the school board, prepare messaging to support an upcoming school levy and share input on several upcoming staff hires. There’s communication, new state legislation and concerned parents.

In such moments of decision making, I might wonder, “Where’s my OK Google?”

Emerging Tech

Here’s the thing. Data exist to help make decisions in all these scenarios. The problem is that all of these data are in several different silos. In the thousand moving parts of a school, we see very few links. I need a solution that tracks these threads of information and relays them to me in a way that makes it easy for me to make a decision.

Solutions are emerging. For example, Project Unicorn is an initiative that aims to have vendors create systems that are committed to data interoperability. Different silos can talk with each other seamlessly, safely and securely.

Among school districts, we are seeing creative, homemade solutions to the problems of decision making starting to appear. This is the road Hamilton City School District in Ohio started traveling five years ago. The district helped to create an education management platform called Abre that tied the essential functions of schooling into one central location. Employing educators with developer skills (and an excellent understanding of what works and doesn’t work in education), they coded the platform to work, look and grow as a modern technology tool. Best of all, they released it as open-source technology, enabling students and other educators to use the code as a means for learning.

Abre is a platform that hosts education applications that provide community-based solutions. In the Hamilton schools, administrators start their day greeted with a real-time dashboard displaying relevant information about the day. They send and receive customized announcements to parents and business partners. They collaborate and see updates to curriculum maps in real time. They see a variety of data points, from assessments and attendance to district learning goals and progress, all within one spot. They can even see a 365-degree view of the individual student that paints a fuller picture of what is going on in that child’s life.

Addressing the administrator’s needs in one spot easily fills the OK we need — in essence, the assist we missed.

ZACH VANDER VEEN is cofounder and vice president of instruction at Abre.io in Cincinnati, Ohio. E-mail: zvanderveen@abre.io. Twitter: @zjvv77