First we gave you Project Buzz, now we give you Project Fizz. Launched a few weeks ago by our Fix-It-Friday Community team; Project Fizz aims to help educators and administrators get access to and make use of data from instructional systems. And now we have the first code to offer.
Why this project? Given the changes brought on by COVID-19, almost all school districts are using virtual and blended models for SY 20-21. This means huge increases in the use of online instructional systems in general, and more data being generated by students on a continual basis. And because teachers no longer have the benefit of face-to-face communication and instruction these systems are now more critical than ever to understanding student progress.
But as with all instructional and other school district tools, no single system tells the whole story of an individual student, therefore pulling data out of various systems so that it can be combined with other data is critical for student and teacher success during this unprecedented school year.
Our community — via the Fix It Fridays meetings — identified top priorities for systems to work with and data to get.
The first tool extracts info about students posts to the Google Classroom Class Stream. The techniques it uses can also be used to expose a lot of similar activity information, so we are interested in community feedback. It’s not a big step to move from this to other activity points of interest.
A Community Effort
Part of this project is also to highlight and where possible contribute to other great projects in this area.
In that spirit we also want to point you to the Google Classroom Connector developed by InnovateEdu. That tool (which we installed and tested) works primarily with assignment data (which is why we started with activity data).
Our code is hosted in this GitHub repo https://github.com/Ed-Fi-Exchange-OSS/Ed-Fi-X-Fizz, and you can see the utility discussed above at this location: https://github.com/Ed-Fi-Exchange-OSS/Ed-Fi-X-Fizz/tree/main/src/google
We welcome contributions as well – if you have improvements or just suggestions, please let us know or join us live!
