District Data Strategies

To find out more about the way that my district handles data, I talked to the CTA, campus technology assistant, at my school. We discussed many factors that play a role in the framework of maintaining the information for a district as large as mine and this is what I gathered:

The district has set up several difference drives that are backed up onto their servers. Each drive has a different purpose for the various levels of use within the district. Each teacher has a home drive where they can store all any of the important files that they would need for work on a daily basis. Then each campus has a faculty drive where teachers can upload files to collaborate and share. At my campus each grade level or department has an individual folder within the faculty drive for continuous collaboration. For example, my grade level places all of the powerpoint presentations, links to websites, and files needed for specific lessons into our 3rd grade folder for easy access should you need it. Also, our principal has instated a new rule that all lesson plans should be entered into the faculty share folder. This allows each grade to input plans on their own time and flexibility for the principal to access the plans at any given moment. Last, our district has a separate drive for students to maintain data. The entire drive is accessible from any computer on campus to allow student to continue to work on documents from the lab and classroom.

One new feature that my district has recently added is a portal that allows teachers to access their home drive and faculty drive through the internet at home. This is one of the best data strategies that has been implemented thus far! (In my opinion!!) I cannot tell you how many times I started working on a file at work and forgot to put it onto my flash drive so that I could continue to work on it from home. It has been a life saver.

One last thing that we talked about was the data storage and backing up procedures. The district backs up all drives on a daily basis in case something, like the unfortunate accident at my school where an anonymous teacher deleted our entire faculty share, happens to damage it.