Friday, May 23, 2014

Chromebooks and Schoology: The 2013-14 CCSD School Year by the Numbers

Cross posted from Jay's blog here.  Enjoy!

The school year is winding down so naturally it's time to look back and measure our team's impact as a group.  Our CIO asked us to compile some Schoology/Chromebook numbers and statistics to be shared with our school board.  Before we began number crunching we knew the numbers were going to be impressive.  We didn't think the numbers would as impressive as compiled below.  Let me elaborate.

Rewind to the beginning of this school year.  A purchase was approved by our school board for Chromebooks for all of our schools.  This wasn't a few Chromebooks per class or a cart for every building.  This was 18,000+ Chromebooks for the students of Cherry Creek School District.  The total number worked out to a 2:1 student to Chromebook ratio in our middle and high schools and a 4:1 ratio across the district in grades two through five in our elementary schools.  (For perspective, the only "complaint" we've received in regards to the Chromebooks is that buildings want more of them and that's a decent place to be.)

The Chromebooks gave us the access, now we needed a place to learn, interact, store materials, and share online.  Prior to the Chromebooks being purchased there was another significant investment made for a district-wide learning management system.  That LMS was Schoology.

The pre-Chromebook global Schoology statistics for our district (from August 2013 through November 2013) looked like this:

700,000+ visits
5,800,000+ page views
Seven minutes and 47 seconds was the average time per visit
65,500+ comments posted
Almost 77,000 submissions
47,500+ files uploaded to Schoology

The Chromebooks arrived in buildings in November 2013 and were fully enrolled and ready to use by early December 2013.  It was time to get to work and that's what happened across the district.  The post-Chromebook Schoology stats (from December 2013 through March 2014) looked like this:

1,039,000+ visits
Almost 9,000,000 page views
Average time per Schoology visit: eight minutes and 41 seconds
147,000+ comments posted
200,000+ submissions
66,500 files uploaded to Schoology

Let's take a moment to compare the pre and post-Chromebook numbers.  After the Chromebooks arrived in schools and were updated/enrolled on our domain there were:

Over 333,000 more vists to Schoology
3.1 million+ more page views in Schoology
81,000+ more comments left in Schoology.
125,000+ more assignment submitted by students.
19,000 more files uploaded to Schoology.
Also, the average Schoology visit increased by almost one minute.  Multiply that by 1,000,000+ visits and that's a lot of time.

Overall, our CCSD teachers and students visited/will visit Schoology 2,000,000+ times this school year.  Multiply that by the average time per visit and that's 275,000+ hours spent on our LMS.  That's a little thing I like to call return on investment. 

All of this activity was not a direct result of the Chromebooks, but it can be said with confidence that most of it was.  Many schools had some access already, but the Chromebooks allowed more widespread and equitable access across our entire district.  Our network administrators also have done an absolutely FABULOUS job with making sure our buildings had the infrastructure to handle all of this new traffic.  More about the powerful and essential work they do here.

So there you have it, impressive numbers that reflect a new chapter of teaching and learning in Cherry Creek Schools.  The great news is that we're just getting started.  More Chromebooks (right around 4,000) are on the way to provide grades 1-5 a 2.5:1 student to Chromebook ratio in our elementary schools.  Our board and those involved have made a huge investment in CCSD's future.  We have seen it pay off already and we're all definitely looking forward to where things progress from here.

(And just for reference, here's the Google presentation we shared with our CIO complete with fancy graphs and cool captions.  Feel free to check it out below or for a little closer look at the presentation click on this link.)

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