texcellence

I will definitely look into this and also speak with some of the district schools. Thank you all again for your warm welcome and responses!

The training sessions will be about 1-2 hours at a time and there will be several trainers monitoring their usage. We're planning to first give the students a pre-survey asking about their usage for educational related activities on the computer and then we're having the lab trainers help them create an account on this web-based program that tracks the amount of time they spend on it and what activities they complete. We're definitely putting a lot of trust in them but we don't have the resources to do anything more "official". We're really just measuring the time increased on this specific learning website... for now at least!

Thank you for your reply! I am hoping to meet with one of the school districts "database" whiz's and I hope I can gain some insight into how they record and measure their data. This is verbatim from our program's goals... maybe it will shed a little light that I left out of my original post: 1. Improvement in Digital Literacy Skills: 75% of students who begin Microsoft Digital Literacy Curriculum will attain passing scores and certificates of completion. Trainers will facilitate the training and track progress of a representative sample of students. 2. Time spent on digital learning activities: Students participating in the labs will increase the number of hours using technology resources for homework, self-directed learning, and scholastic research by 50%. Usage reports generated from PowerMyLearning and pre- and post-surveys will be conducted to assess the change. 3. Student achievement: 90% of students participating in labs with after-school programs during the 2013-14 school year will be promoted to the next grade level. Partners track student performance in their programs and will provide a report at the end of the year. Again, thank you for your reply!

We have to report quarterly on the impact the training program is making on students' participation (through the time spent on the digital learning activities) and digital literacy skills. We're also going to have the individual lab sites track the affect the training has on the students' academic achievement (whether it be through advancing to the next grade level, attendance, etc). The training will last about 30 weeks and we'll need to collect student usage reports and digital literacy test scores periodically throughout that time period to make sure our training program is actually helping the students. I think an Excel spreadsheet "system" is probably a safe bet but I wanted to make sure there wasn't some magical program out there where the lab manager could input each students' monthly results and spit out statistics of how it's benefiting them I'm still learning about all the IT stuff that goes into my job (it's actually my favorite part of it!) so I do appreciate your help!

Hi all, new to the site and have a question that I hope someone can answer. I manage a program (part of a non-profit) that donates refurbished computers to K-12 students in need. This year, we have branched off to creating computer labs in various youth-serving organizations throughout the school district. While our main focus in past years has been just getting the computers into the hands of students in need, we are now putting an intense focus on training the students on how to use computers, internet, educational/school resources, etc. We plan to have 20 labs open by Dec 2014... we have 6 open now and the next step is to get these training programs implemented. Because we are a non-profit, we need measurable goals and outcomes to report back to our donors. We plan to measure student success by tracking increased time spent on digital learning activities (we're using a web-based educational program that measures the time students spend on it automatically) and improvement in digital literacy skills (we'll track this by giving a web-based digital literacy certificate test pre- and post- training). So there are small systems already in place to track the individual students but once we have 20 labs open, it's going to be difficult to monitor. I've been told that an MIS could be really helpful for this. Each lab will have a "Lab Manager" as well as a few trainers... ideally we'd like them to report student progress/results monthly. I think it'd be best if it was web-based so each lab manager could just log in and enter their data- then I can just login and pull whatever info I need whenever I need it. I apologize for the wordiness of this post and I hope it makes sense- ha! Any input would be appreciated. Would Excel spreadsheets be easier? Is there a free (or low-cost) web-based program that you think might be a good fit for this? Is MIS even relevant to this? Thank you in advance!