Edualizer is a digital dashboard for assessing education performance. A few plug-ins are associated with it, namely edCharts and edSocial. It is customized with drag-and-drop widget ability, and a content sensitive, live search option. Edualizer is a role-based portal, so we offer several different types of roles. You can have a high-level role that can be used for a board member or state superintendant. You can have a school-based role for administrators or guidance counselors, or a teacher role that allows each educator to view their classes and students. Finally, you can have a student or parent role in which you can view an individual student.

Each role allows you to view the roles below you. State superintendants can quickly view all teachers, students and schools, administrators have easy access to all of the teachers and students in their school, and teachers can quickly assess all of their students. Students can see only themselves, and parents can see only their child(ren).

Edualizer’s digital dashboard allows you to create separate dashboards that provide different views into different sets of data. These customizable dashboards will make assessing students, teachers, schools and districts quick and easy. A teacher can create a dashboard for all of his math students in algebra versus his math students in geometry. An administrator can create a dashboard for all of her teachers and a separate dashboard for all of her students. Superintendants can have a dashboard of different schools versus different teachers or performance of board members.

Edualizer allows the user to create datasets and apply them to different charting components. Data charts can be visualized on a map, a bar chart, or a line graph. There are two different models of Edualizer.: The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Model and the Enterprise Model. The SaaS Model can be found on edualizer.com. It allows a school system to buy licenses, and we host it for them. Once you create an account and buy licenses, you can assign each account a role (administrator, superintendant, teacher, student, etc.). For more information about how the SaaS Model works, go to connect.adobe.com. The Enterprise Model allows users to keep certain data private. This model is installed into a school system’s server and is integrated into their databases as a consulting integration and licensing model for Edualizer.

Powered by KickApps, edSocial is the ultimate networking spot for the professional world of teaching. It allows users to engage in social networking, and photo and video sharing. Need a place to vent about your first period English class? Want to put your old lesson plans to use? Have a book or teaching style to recommend? On edSocial, you can contribute comments, add ratings, post on discussion boards, write or comment on blogs, and much more.

edCharts, the charting component, is a separate website as well. It is a SaaS Model and allows users to pay $30 for a month’s access and create as many charts as they want to, or pay $300 for a year’s access and create as many charts as they want to. The charts (bar charts, pie charts, line graphs, and more) are printable and come along with a code snippet that allows the user to imbed that chart onto their website. edCharts is one of the plug-ins that works with Edualizer and is partly comprised of three proprietary charts: the radar view, performance index (SPI – Student, School, or Staff Performance Index), and our map view.
With the SaaS model of Edualizer, you can pay to have edCharts within it (or just have edSocial within it). Likewise, with the enterprise model, you can pay to have edCharts as one of your components and edSocial as another component.
edCharts is also customized with the ability to upload your own metrics. For example, you can look at your school’s GPA, state assessments, and filter these results based on a certain date range. Whether you’re viewing a certain high school’s general data, ethnicities, or number of students who purchase school lunches, you can use these search topics to reduce the information shown on either the map or performance index graph.

The first proprietary chart, the map view, allows you to see where students’ GPA’s align within their communities. If you look at a community with underachieving students and pull up their GPA on the map, it will display red. If you look at a community with high achieving students and pull up their GPA on the map, it will display green. Putting a community’s GPA on display in this manner will make it easier for the community to advocate for necessary changes to their education policy.

The second plug-in is a performance index – Student Performance Index, Staff Performance Index, or School Performance Index (SPI). There will be different data available regarding GPA scores, SAT’s weighted per year, and other statistics that are tracked over a period of time.

The performance index displays the change over time for a dataset (for example, if the yearly averages from 2006 to 2008 are 2.5, 2.6 and 2.4, the performance index will show a +1 change). By showing the change over time instead of merely showing yearly averages, you’ll be able to see when you have good stuff happening, stagnation, or a decrease in performance. Therefore, we can enhance the learning process by monitoring performance and changing policy on the fly to positively affect the outcome.
You can also look at one student’s GPA over time, a combination of students’ GPA’s over time, and you can also look at it from a teacher’s perspective. If you look at a teacher’s sum total of their students’ performance indexes at any given time, minus the previous 5 years and plus the next 5 years, you can see the trend of those students and layer it by subject. You can see the trend of the selected students as it goes in and out of a particular teacher so that you know the relative effective level of that teacher.

What’s the best fit for this student? This is the primary question that will direct a student’s education track. We’ve defined the best fit as whatever aligns best with the student’s aptitudes and interests. The goal is to let the student loose in the world of education, see where their aptitudes are and their interests lie, and then educate them in the things that they excel at and interest them.

With the radar view, we’ll start the student at kindergarten and allow them to take whatever interests them. Let’s say you start to see aptitudes and interests for adding because the student separates blocks by chronological numbers, or you start to see aptitudes and interests for color because the student separates blocks by color categories. Our goal is to place this student with his peers who share his aptitudes and interests rather than locking him to 33 peers with different interests in one classroom.
The radar view also provides the ability to change the metaphor of the curriculum. If I’m an auto-mechanic and I really like working with pistons (versus an artist who likes working with colors), and I’m in math class, then I might have a problem that says 1 piston + 1 piston = 2 pistons (versus 1 crayon + 1 crayon = 2 crayons). We’re still teaching 1 + 1 = 2, but we’re catering the knowledge toward the individual student. We give them more time throughout the day to do what they’re good at and what interests them. What you’ll notice over the course of 12 years is that if teachers end up spending more time dedicated toward what each student is good at, they’ll already be excelling at something by the time they reach college. Then the college experience won’t be centralized around finding a career path – they’ll be tracking toward that all along.