MASA Feature TRIG’s Data Integration Activity to Save Districts Time and Money www.gomasa.org 23 The true value of the Technology Readiness Infrastructure Grant (TRIG) comes from its statewide activities. Even though these activities have the greatest impact on districts and students in Michigan, they can also be the most difficult to understand. Many educators do not realize the impact the TRIG activities have on their educational process. These activities have been able to undertake technology projects that have long been talked about by technology leaders in the state, but have never had a structure or opportunity to be realized. The TRIG activities are collectively able to move online testing solutions forward, and generally make our Michigan students more technologically prepared for the future. The TRIG statewide activities are broken down into three categories for ease of understanding. Each activity is classified based on the areas that they impact most with the work that they accomplish. The activities are categorized under Personalized Learning, Actionable Data, or Ubiquitous Access. One of the activities that will have a major impact on districts is the Data Integration activity, which falls under Actionable Data. Data Integration activity aims to reduce redundancy for districts The Data Integration activity seeks to resolve a longstanding issue in Michigan schools, which has been the inconsistent ways in which student data is managed and handled. Each school district makes its own set of choices as to which systems to use and how to share data among those systems. This leads to the unreliable integration of systems and a large amount of redundant work, as many districts and ISDs perform duplicate work to address the issue. Data Integration will solve this inef-ficiency by establishing regional data hubs to handle the bridging of student data among applications and reducing reporting redundancy. This approach will then centralize data bridging processes so that a connector written for a product will work for all users of that product, regardless of which student information system (SIS) they use. Having a data hub at the center of the process allows for data to be standardized on its way into the new system. This enables connectors out to other systems to work no matter which system originated the data. To see this concept in action, consider the example of a food service system that works with five different student information systems. If they have provided standard connectors, there is By Tim Hall
MASA Leader - Spring 2015
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