Illuminations and Insights

Across districts and states, education leaders are asking more specific, more urgent questions about their data. EA’s data visualization product, Podium, helps to answer common questions about topics such as chronic absenteeism, enrollment trends, behavior patterns, and performance. But many of our partners also need additional dashboards tailored to their local context, priorities, and strategies. Podium+, our self-service dashboarding add-on, empowers partners to build custom dashboards using Podium’s platform and tools. Sharing those dashboards broadly with the educators and leaders who need them most hasn't been easy — until now. In this blog, we’re introducing Embed Studio, a new Podium+ feature that enables partners to publish the dashboards they build directly into the Podium application alongside the EA-managed dashboards.

Get to know Technical Product Manager Katie O'Brien in the latest installment of our Day in the Life blog series. In the blog, Katie discusses her journey from intern to full-time staff member at EA, her involvement in product development for our data visualization tool, Podium, and how she thinks technology advancements will bring about new changes and insights to the EdTech space in the coming year.

Every fall, the Ed-Fi Alliance hosts its annual Ed-Fi Summit conference to bring together state and local education leaders, EdTech providers, educators, and technical experts who are turning data into real solutions for students. Several EA staff attended Ed-Fi Summit 2025 and left the conference energized by the dedication, expertise, and passions of people within the Ed-Fi community that they learned from, presented to, and chatted with at Ed-Fi Summit. In this blog, EA staff share some of their key reflections after attending, presenting, and collaborating at Ed-Fi Summit 2025.

Every year the Ed-Fi Alliance hosts its Technical Congress to bring together members from across the EdTech community, including data scientists, chief architects, IT application developers, software engineers, educational technology developers, and more. The goal of the Ed-Fi Alliance’s Tech Congress is to host a discussion-based forum with the community to help the Ed-Fi Data Standard and technology suite grow more usable, practical, and sophisticated to reach our shared goal of making a positive impact to assist student and classroom outcomes. Staff from across Education Analytics (EA) attended the two-day event and connected with school districts, EdTech leaders, and current and potential partner organizations. In this blog, EA staff share their key takeaways from this year's Ed-Fi Tech Congress.

Making data useful and engaging is one of the most important aspects of our work at EA. This blog discusses reactive data displays, called Shiny dashboards, and showcases several features that make Shinys helpful to education stakeholders and data analysts alike.