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Looking for the Code Island Brigade in Rhode Island?

Check out their website here: http://code-island.org/

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2014 Code for America Fellowship is over!

It's been a great experience working with Rhode Island and we're excited about what was accomplished! While we put our annual report together, here are some things we made or helped with:

Golden Ticket: The software that runs the RI pre-kindergarten lottery and was a part of the application for the Federal Preschool Expansion grant, helping to establish credibility for being able to scale the selection process if the state could offer more pre-K seats.

Code Island Brigade: A volunteer chapter of Code for America that helps connect the government to community members, with a slant towards using technology to do so.

Ticket to RIDE: A prototype for how school registration might look if it was online and more whimsical.

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See what we've been up to from January through June!

http://codeforamerica.github.io/ri-2014-mid-year-report/

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We're Still Here!

Hey Rhode Island. It’s been awhile. Sorry. We’ve been busy.

Since it’s been a bit since we last posted, let's step back and take a look at where we’re at in the scope of this year. Here’s the timeline.

January: Training at CfA

February: Residency in RI. Meet EVERYONE in RI Education (K-12, Adult Education, Gov’t, Libraries). Learn about on-going initiatives and current challenges.

March - August: We continually loop through the following process:  (1) Synthesize findings and identify an area where we can help.  (2) Build prototype.  (3) Review prototype with potential users and see what they think (4) If users like the prototype, take their feedback and build an app. If users don’t like the prototype. Abandon the project (i.e. don’t waste/time money on it) (5) Make sure the app is sustainable and/or that it has an owner for post-fellowship.

September: Final refinement of apps and presentation at CfA Summit

October: Promote apps and begin hand-off to RI

November: Enact sustainability plan and final app hand-off to RI

(Our fellow fellows in Lexington made an awesome diagram of the timeline that explains this much more visually.)

With that said, in March and early April we returned to CfA headquarters in San Francisco to review our February interviews and start identifying areas where we could help empower RI educators. Initially, we came up with a staggering 180+ ideas that we had to narrow down. By early April, we had narrowed down to just six and built out some prototypes/designs.

That brings us to mid-April. Andrew and Anna-Marie returned to the Hope State to run focus groups around these ideas, but also to meet with groups that we weren’t able to chat with in February. (P.S. Thanks so much to everyone that came to the focus groups and gave their earnest feedback! It’s helped a ton!). By the end of the visit, we were still at six idea areas, but had removed those not well received and added a couple that we hadn’t considered before.

Over the course of this past week, we narrowed the six down to three: one big project and two others we’d like to get to if there is time. For the big idea, we’re making sure we have the backing and buy-in before beginning and announcing, but we should know very soon and will definitely share what it is here.

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"The ultimate work is with the children." - STEM Academy

Yesterday plusjeff and alexandertran represented codeforamerica at Andreesen Horowitz for a STEM Roundtable hosted by the Mr. October Foundation and Andreesen Horowitz.

One of many interesting points that came up was this feeling that we should aim to have workers reflect the populations their companies serve...

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Happy birthday, Jeff! 

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Now that we're settled back into CfA home base in San Francisco, we've been fervently reviewing our notes and research. The challenges we heard about during February are both broad and far reaching, so we've been trying to narrow our scope to areas we can have an impact in a within the year. Here are some of the high level thoughts that we've been using to direct our brainstorming:

Libraries: How can libraries better serve the needs of their community?

Grants/Budgets: What tools and processes are available to help schools manage and plan their finances (based on data driven decision making)? What techniques and strategies are helpful to winning grants?

Digital Divide: What can be done to help those on "the wrong side" of it? What are better ways to share knowledge and help develop digital skill sets, for both kids and adults? What digital skills do people need to survive in the modern world?

Connections: How can we help different departments/organizations/people work together within the education sphere? How can RIDE and schools better collaborate or share data? How can schools better communicate with parents?

While we've started with these broad questions, our ideas have tended to be more specific. Here's our process for capturing and prioritizing them:

Define a broad problem area (example: Libraries)

Jot down problem/opportunity statements (example: "Libraries can better engage their communities")

Under the problem/opportunity statement, list solution statements ("Libraries can act as a meeting place for facilitating mentoring and tutoring, but they need a way to arrange those meetings (match making for tutoring, etc.)")

For each solution statement rate the following factors on a 1 (low) to 3 (high) scale: team member interest, reusability, inclusivity, impact, feasibility, strengthens gov't/community relationships, increases capacity, contributes to civic tech movement, improves transparency, is there sponsorship. Not all factors are equal, so the ratings for each category are weighted based on how important the team feels they are.

See which solution statements scored the highest.

Prototype the high scoring ones.

We've typically started our brainstorming in the physical space (think stick notes, pictured), but then moved into a spreadsheet to capture votes and do prioritization calculations based on ratings.

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We're back in San Francisco, catching up with the other Code for America fellow teams and starting to synthesize our meetings and research from February. More details to come.

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Taking a RIDE

During our last couple days in RI, we had the opportunity to visit RIDE (RI Department of Education) to learn more about the initiatives going on and to better understand the "who's who" of the organization.

We were able to touch base with the following people.

Holly Walsh: Holly (pictured with us above) helped guide us through who we should meet with inside of RIDE. But aside from that, she also gave us a very helpful timeline of the State's education initiatives, providing some great background to meetings we had through the month. Additionally, Holly is involved in enabling technology use in the classroom, improving proficiency-based learning, and more.

Nancy Labonte: Adult education specialist with the Office of Multiple Pathways. This office serves a lot of out-of-school youth, the ESOL population, and retirees that have trouble with digital literacy or are in need of core job skills.

Sarah Anderson: Transformation Specialist at RIDE. Deals with troubled schools and has created a dashboard to track progress and metrics surrounding them.

Jan Mermin: The program manager of 21st Century Community Learning Centers. Jan's work revolves around before/after school programs that help students stay engaged and enriched.

Michael Ferry, Peg Votta, and Mario Goncalves: The Data & Analysis team at RIDE handles the intake and digestion of education data. They have also worked in the space of making sure that there is an Instructional Management System (IMS) that works for all the schools in the State.

ONIS Team (pictured below): The Office of Network and Information Services is the in-house software development team and coordinates with IT vendors on behalf of RIDE. They manage over 40 apps and are very hard at work with future software initiatives that help enable schools, administrators, and folks within RIDE itself.

We're very grateful to the folks at RIDE for sharing insights into what they are working on and helping to connect many dots for us. We looking forward to working together.

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The team meeting with RI Governor Lincoln Chafee, who is sporting his new Code for America track jacket! (Left to right: Jeff, Anna-Marie, Gov. Chafee, RI CDO Thom Guertin , Andrew)

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Smithfield High School

On Tuesday morning, we had the pleasure of visiting Smithfield High School. The school uses mostly traditional/lecture style classes, but does have quite a few electives that use blended learning. Our visit was mostly with the awesome students in Michael Deslauriers Computer Science class, where they learn to make Java programs and Android apps. Earlier this year, Mr. D's class submitted an idea for the Verizon Innovative App Challenge. Their idea is for an Android app that helps prepare the school for public safety issues, such as a school fire evacuation. After winning Best in State, they find out today if they won Best in Nation (good luck!!).

After visiting the class, Mr. D gave us a look around the school, checking out some classes such as Chinese immersion, industrial design (including: bicycle creation), math, and food health. We also had the opportunity to meet with Daniel Kelly, the schools principal, where we chatted about experimentation, technology in the classroom, teacher autonomy, and how schools interact with RIDE (the Rhode Island Department of Education).

Thanks for having us Smithfield!

(Michael Deslauriers giving us the tour)

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Meeting with the Personalized and Proficiency-based Learning Coalition at the RI Foundation. This group is focused on the implementation of digitally-rich learning, as well as the sustainability and professional development needed to do it. Holly Walsh of RIDE leads this activity of brainstorming the things needed to have more digital education in classrooms.

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School Models and UCAP Visit

We’ve had a chance to visit lots of schools this month, each has its own spin on things.

Some of the approaches to teaching that we’ve seen have been these:

Traditional/Lecture: Chances are that if you graduated from high school before the mid-2000s, this was likely the style of teaching you experienced. A teacher stands in the front and lectures, sometimes breaking to some activities (like worksheets or reading). This seems to still be the common way we’ve seen public high schools doing things. Typically reading and problem solving sets are assigned as homework.

Blended Learning: Combines computer-guided instruction with traditional teaching. A blended learning strategy we saw at Pleasant View Elementary was called “Three Station Rotation.” In this scheme students in a single class are broken into groups and rotate between traditional lectures, hands on or group activities, and computer learning (such as learning through a math game, etc.). A strength of this approach is that each station has a teacher or teaching aide, which creates a smaller virtual class, allowing each child to be helped and monitored more closely. Another benefit is that it employees multiple teaching strategies, which acknowledges that people learn in different ways. The challenge is having enough teachers and teaching aides to support it. We also visited Warwick Neck Elementary which didn’t have the same number of laptops or teaching aides, but had an effective two station rotation that encouraged creative skills via the computers in the classroom.

Flipped Learning: A form of blended learning that strongly shifts the emphasis away from lectures to computer-based learning. The idea is that students self learn via online lessons rather than having a teacher-lead lecture to initially introduce the concepts. Teachers, still an equally and as important player as traditional learning, simply have a different role: guiding hands-on work, answering questions, preparing the repertoire of lessons, and monitoring students progress so that they can be better helped. A strength of flipped learning is that students progress at a more natural and individualized paced, not forcibly moving on simply because the lecture needs to progress (and before they may have mastered the ideas/skills). A couple challenges to this are that schools are structured around age or grade-based learning (i.e. everyone is expected to be at a certain skill level based on how old they are, ignoring IEPs and special education needs at times), it requires a great deal of professional development for teachers and administrators to implement, and schools must have the technology infrastructure and know-how to support it (which isn’t cheap).

Of course, the style of instruction isn’t the only way to foster learning. On Monday, Jim Bowker of UCAP (Urban Collaborative Accelerated Program) invited us over to see what is going on there. UCAP is a school that helps middle-school aged kids that have repeated a grade catch-up so that they are ready for a traditional high school by 9th or 10th grade. The reason for this is that students that have repeated a grade prior to high school are statistically at risk of dropping out before getting their diploma. Getting support, such as attending a school such as UCAP, helps minimize this risk. From what we could tell, this was their strategy:

Create a fostering environment. What happens at home can very much impact a student’s progress in the classroom. UCAP can’t solve all those problems, but does its best by creating a welcoming environment (teachers go by their first names, class sizes are small) and families are engaged often (parents can visit classes, families are invited on field trips, UCAP has Lady - a staff member dedicated to parent outreach and communication)

An increased focus on core curriculum that is needed to succeed at the high school level, such as reading and math literacy. This came at the cost of classes such as art and music (which the students we met complained about this absence, although their website cites an art teacher as a member of the faculty). While we weren’t able to meet with the after school coordinator, it seems like UCAP stresses extracurricular activities provided by the school to fill this gap (in which community organizations/members help with).

Continuous improvement on curriculum. We spoke with Chris, the schools director of curriculum, on the importance of evaluating what is being taught with the staff. Stuff that isn’t working can be removed and new approaches can be employed rapidly.

Ultimately, the choice on the approach comes down to what teachers and administrators feel best works for their kids and what allows them to meet the current accountability standards (now: NECAP, next year: PARCC). It’s easy to see that it’s not always one-size fits all, but also that there are some really great approaches that schools are experimenting with -- and that is very exciting!

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Alex Tran, Code for America's Fellowship program manager, was our trusty CodeAcross food and beverage wrangler yesterday. Thanks for all your help and support, Alex!

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Thank you to all the CodeAcross Rhode Island attendees!

We had a wonderful turnout of developers, designers, community members, data analysts, government employees, and geeks in the Rhode Island State House today. Stay tuned for more from today's exciting kickoff to Rhode Island's Code for America Brigade including footage of our exciting design challenge.

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CodeAcross Rhode Island

We are excited to be hosting Rhode Island's Code for America Brigade kickoff as part of the nationwide #CodeAcross weekend this Saturday, February 22 in the Rhode Island State House rotunda.

There are a limited number of tickets available. RSVP's close Friday at noon. bit.ly/1aWdPrL

We need everybody, not just coders: people that know about the community and the issues it faces, folks in government, artists that can make things gorgeous and usable, and those that can create elegant online solutions.

We’ll meet each other and discuss what's going on in Rhode Island and areas of opportunity that technology can help address. The output of our discussion will be a more concrete list of projects and ideas (and perhaps wireframes/designs) that the Brigade can tackle at future meetings. 

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We made it to the beach!