Streamlining K-12 Data at Osseo Area Schools: Overcoming the Challenges of Fragmented Software

One District’s Story of Switching to Integrated Edtech Products

A common challenge for today’s educators is accessing their student data from multiple software products. According to the 2022 Education Focus Report, 46% of educators say juggling multiple digital tools for teaching and learning is a top educational tech challenge. IT leaders in the 2021 CoSN EdTech Trends report say that data interoperability is one of their top two tech challenges and No. 3 unmet tech need.

At the same time, educators recognize the value that student data holds when it comes to identifying struggling students and making sound decisions to get them back on track. According to a Brookings Institution report, 54% of education leaders say more accurate data would make information more useful to education decision-makers.

To overcome these data challenges, Minnesota’s Osseo Area Schools worked to create a unified education ecosystem that supports students and staff with connected data and insights. Here’s how they did it. 

Keys to Education Data Success: Start with Communication 

The district used communication and engagement to gain valuable feedback and ensure buy-in from all stakeholders. That work began with data meetings between its professional learning communities (PLCs), the district’s technology department, and administrators within each of the district’s schools. Those meetings helped everyone better understand how they could use data to efficiently and effectively make informed decisions to impact a student’s success.

Osseo Area Schools’ technology department also met within a core planning team that included representation from multilingual learners, special education, teaching and learning, building administration, and equity. The team met monthly to discuss: 

• What’s happening in the technology landscape 
• Status of classroom technology and effectiveness 
• How to improve and support instruction 
• Ways to improve the tools, resources, and data that teachers need to be effective in the classroom

Here’s How Osseo Area Schools Selected the Best Software for its Data Needs 

Based on constant communication, the core planning team worked to determine the best software systems for its data needs. In selecting software to improve data usage, the district focused on unified products that ensure data is central to impacting classrooms.

Throughout that process, the district has selected multiple PowerSchool products, helping to create one secure, interoperable ecosystem with connected products, shared data, and a streamlined workflow. Systems become more efficient when they work together and securely share data. Data automatically updates across the system when a change is made in one program.

“We needed to make our data tools more meaningful and user-friendly, so they could help us drive where we’re going as an organization. We engaged in a large process and brought in a lot of data solutions to understand which one could best meet our needs. We could see the commitment within PowerSchool to truly partner and build something that will help us drive innovation in our organization,” says Anthony Padrnos, Ed.S., Osseo Area Schools’ Executive Director of Technology. 

At the forefront of Osseo Area School’s modernization has been PowerSchool PowerSchool Student Analytics, an award-winning data analytics software solution. Unified Insights securely connects the district’s data from multiple software products, presents it in clear, easy-to-read dashboards, and allows administrators and teachers to drill down deeper into any data sets. That gives them a comprehensive picture of individual students, classrooms, schools, and the entire district. 

“For us, Unified Insights is a wraparound tool to bring in lots of data points, build visualizations, and go from classroom to boardroom to engage and interact data to drive decision-making, instructional practice, and ROI,” says Padrnos. “Unified Insights allows us to organize that data in a meaningful and visual way that’s easy to use. Our organization can ask the right questions to drive change and significantly impact student success.” 

How An Integrated Approach to Education Benefits the District

In addition to Unified Insights, the district’s unified toolset includes PowerSchool PowerSchool Schoology Learning, PowerSchool Professional Learning, PowerSchool Perform, PowerSchool Applicant Tracking, PowerSchool eFinancePlus, and PowerSchool Predictive Enrollment Analytics.

This integrated set of solutions creates one unified system with a familiar interface, single sign-on (SSO), and streamlined workflows. As a result, teachers no longer use spreadsheets and disparate data sets. They now have access to products that integrate, providing data for grades, attendance, assignment scores, assessments, and behavior that all go into Unified Insights for clear views of overall student performance.

“The more familiarity we have going from one product to the next really cuts down on the amount of training we need to do for every product because there’s already a familiarity and some efficiencies created by the navigation of using our different products within our ecosystem,” says Padrnos.

Other integration benefits are evident between Schoology Learning—its LMS—with Professional Learning. The district’s teaching and learning team has utilized Schoology Learning to create professional learning pathways to further their skill sets and focus on meaningful and impactful opportunities. Integration between the systems has created a conference-style professional learning format where teachers can view and register for courses within one system.