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.

EA's data visualization tool, Rally Analytics Platform, developed in collaboration with the South Carolina Department of Education and CORE Districts, provides actionable academic and well-being data for teachers and administrators to better understand and support students. This year, districts across South Carolina, where Rally is known as "Teacher Navigator," began using new Groups & Interventions feature, giving administrators and staff a streamlined way to organize, track, and strengthen their supplemental student support programs. In this blog, Director of Software Solutions Ben Dederich emphasizes the benefits of this new feature through highlighting Laurens County School District 55 in South Carolina, where intervention staff and administrators in the district can manage their groups directly in Rally—saving time and improving accuracy.

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.

To ensure that dashboards genuinely help educators, we start with the end in mind: what data should be included, how it should be displayed, and why it will be useful for the people who rely on it. Rally, EA's data visualization product, is meant to provide a snapshot of student data, with one key area being assessment data. Rally is not meant to replace the detailed reports provided by assessment vendors. Instead, it is meant to provide an effective overview of that data. Therefore, at EA, we strive to make well-informed decisions on what to display so teachers and administrators can access the right data at the right time to make the right decisions. In this blog, Product Manager Joshua Terchek and Senior Data Engineer Manager Susan Xiong discuss the process of building out these meaningful dashboards within our data visualization products, Rally Analytics Platform and Podium.

Get to know Product Manager Joshua Terchek in the latest installment of our Day in the Life blog series. In this blog, Joshua discusses his product development work on EA's data visualization tools, Rally and Podium, how asking thoughtful questions and leading with empathy helps him build better products, and how he discovered his passion for cooking.

EA created an open-source operational data store product, StartingBlocks, driven by an intent to foster openness and shared innovation within the education system. In this blog, VP of Interoperability Solutions Rosh Dhanawade and Cloud Engineer Manager Eshara Mondal describe the development and implementation process involved in creating StartingBlocks, the challenges and successes they encountered along the way, and the conversations that led to StartingBlocks becoming open source.