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Addison Northwest Supervisory Union
Progressive Reporting!
Located in rural Vermont, just south of Burlington, the Addison
Northwest Supervisory Union is a family of four schools -- Addison
Central School, Ferrisburgh Central School, Vergennes Union
Elementary School, and Vergennes Union High School -- serving the
students of the towns of Addison, Ferrisburgh, Vergennes, Waltham,
and Panton. It's a small district -- about 1600 students -- but
it's also a forward-thinking district when it comes to using
technology to aid in its ongoing mission. "We were looking for a
way to improve student instruction at the classroom level and track
student progress on a district-wide basis," comments Educational
Technology Coordinator Bob Owens. "Our teachers were using a
paper-based system that worked fine for individual teachers -- but
there was no efficient way to analyze the results of the
data."
Bob is an old hand with FileMaker Pro -- he's used it since 1988,
and was quick to recommend it as a solution to the district's
dilemma. "We developed a relational database that tied into our
student management system and that was quickly embraced by our
staff," he explains. "We considered using Access, but the
flexibility of FileMaker Pro made it the choice for our system. We
developed a FileMaker Pro solution that enabled teachers to record
student progress toward locally-developed standards in the areas of
literacy, math, and science. The teachers can print reports for
parents or students at any time, and administrators can analyze
student data across all the schools. FileMaker Pro made it easy to
design a system that mirrored our paper system to make the learning
curve short for the teachers while at the same time allowing for
sophisticated learning functions."
The system Bob implemented consists of nine relational databases,
containing more than 64,000 records -- and it's been so well
received that three other school districts in the area are adopting
it as well. There's also smooth and easy integration between
FileMaker Pro and Microsoft Excel -- allowing even more flexibility
in the presentation of data. "We have been exporting data to Excel
for further analysis and graphing," Bob comments. I've created
scripts that extract data based on student histories and move the
data into Excel where we create reports for teachers and
parents."
And it's through these reports that the system helps keep parents
better informed about the progress of their children. "The major
benefit has been improved communication with parents," Bob notes.
"We've received positive comments regarding the ability of teachers
to show parents what is expected of their children and how they're
progressing both individually and in comparison to their
peers."
Reports that matter -- reports that inform -- reports that help to
educate. And all prepared by FileMaker Pro!
Contact information
Contact Info for Customer:Bob Owens
Education Technology Coordinator
Addison Northwest Supervisory Union
802-877-3332
bowens@anwsu.org
Filemaker Contact:
Kevin Mallon
Public Relations Manager
FileMaker Inc.
408-987-7227
kevin_mallon@filemaker.com
http://www.filemaker.com
- A progressive approach to student progress reports -- that's the idea behind Addison Northwest Supervisory Union's implementation of FileMaker Pro!
- K-12 Education