Surprisingly, one of the NCTIES sessions that I was most excited by was the session about Home Base, the new management system from NCDPI that will combine a Student Information System with an Instructional Improvement System. All of these applications will exist in one place and be accessed with one login. It’s the definition of stream-lining.
Here’s how it will work:
Teachers will be able to login to Home Base with one login. They can access the Student Information System (SIS) called Powerschool. Within Powerschool, teachers will be able to take attendance, view student profiles, enter grades, see assessment data, and more. This system will take the place of NC Wise.
Also integrated into Homebase will be the Instructional Improvement System. This system will be a database of instructional resources (lesson plans, Open Source content, some subscription content). Teachers can see a dashboard of their students where they can sort students by assessment data. (I’m thinking this will be useful when grouping students for team time?) It will show standards where students demonstrate low performance, and will provide links to lessons that address those standards in order to provide ideas and suggestions for remediation.
In addition to resources that are fed into the system by DPI, teachers will also have the ability to upload and store their own lesson materials in the IIS side of Home Base. This is particularly exciting for me, as it will give our teachers a great format for sharing and collaborating. No more trying to share Dropbox folders or saving things to our school’s shared drive that can only be accessed in the building! Teachers will be able to choose if the materials they upload are shared within their team, school, district, or across the state.
There will be Professional Development tools housed within Home Base, as well as everything that is needed for the Teacher Evaluation process.
The presenter of the session, Dan Gwaltney from DPI, said that he felt one of the best ways to increase teacher effectiveness is to save teachers time. That is the mission behind the roll-out of this new system, and I’m excited by the possibilities it presents.
Here’s to hoping that it’s everything it promises to be!
To learn more about Home Base, view the slideshare below, (I found this online; I did not create it, but there was no author listed to give credit to. I’m guess it’s made by someone from DPI) or visit DPI’s website, http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/homebase/ :
A Corner of the Forest 