Greeley, Colo. (Mar. 8, 2010) – District administrators at Carmel Clay Schools, Ind., are empowering staff, school building administrators and educators to improve instruction through immediate access to reliable student data available through Pinnacle Insight from GlobalScholar.

Accredited by AdvancED, the most rigorous school accreditation organization in the United States, the district’s evaluation noted, “Carmel Clay Schools operates from a data-driven and results-focused mindset.” To help further the district’s strategic and school improvement plans, Carmel Clay Schools partnered with GlobalScholar to implement Pinnacle Insight, an intuitive, user-friendly data management solution.

Pinnacle Insight provides administrators the ability to review and share reports about class trends and predictive indexes, giving educators access to meaningful and insightful analysis about the district’s more than 15,000 K-12 students in real-time. In addition, Carmel Clay Schools plans to expand access to Pinnacle Insight through classroom and parent portals, offering educators and parents direct access to view student information over time.

“Our past data warehouse and reporting system experiences never fulfilled our district’s vision of how data could be used. Only power users had the background knowledge to extract needed data,” said Christi Cloud, technology specialist for Carmel Clay Schools. “After implementing Pinnacle Insight, we immediately saw an increase in usage of data throughout the district. Principals, central office administrators, department chairs, ESL and Title I teachers, and counselors were all using the system to monitor student progress.”

Pinnacle Insight allows district and school building administrators to use data to plan instructional programs and identify individual student needs. In addition, the extracted data serves as the foundation of the district’s approach to Response to Intervention programming.

“Shortly after Pinnacle Insight was available to district users, we noticed the nature of support calls were shifting from queries about technical problems to requests for more data and reporting capabilities,” continued Cloud. “Our users were empowered and eager to see data in new ways to make better instructional decisions.”

District technology staff also appreciate that Pinnacle Insight is able to quickly and efficiently pull data in from multiple external sources through SQL language on the back-end, while providing a flexible and user-friendly interface on the front-end. Administrators have the ability to modify or create unique dashboards for each user within the district. This immediate data-informed feedback, coupled with best practices, is helping district and school leaders reach their student learning goals.

“Building on more than 20 years of experience, we understand that school districts need data analytic systems to store and generate accurate data and reports for the users who need it, by their preferred method, at the right time,” said Rob Kilgarriff, senior vice president of sales & marketing, GlobalScholar. “Carmel Clay Schools is an excellent example of how a dedicated district can query data, collected over years and across schools and classrooms, to share findings with all stakeholders to improve instruction and learning practices.”

Pinnacle Insight is a component of the Pinnacle Suite, an end-to-end online solution that provides districts a low total cost-of-ownership by combining real-time data with powerful technology. Eliminating the need to maintain a data management framework built from various products, the Pinnacle Suite offers a standards-based gradebook; student information system; performance-based scheduler; integrated curriculum and assessments; data analytics; tutoring; supplemental education services; and professional development programming, all in one platform.

More Information

The Pinnacle Suite is available with pricing based on student enrollment. To learn more about the Pinnacle Suite, visit www.pinnaclesuite.com.

About GlobalScholar

GlobalScholar, formerly Excelsior Software, delivers the technical innovations that meet the needs of today’s evolving data-driven educational system. The company’s end-to-end solution, the Pinnacle Suite, increases teacher effectiveness, improves communication and empowers educators to transform practices that improve student learning for the digital age. Ensuring a high return on investment, the Pinnacle Suite provides: a gradebook; student information system; performance-based scheduler; integrated curriculum and assessments; data analytics; tutoring; supplemental education services; and professional development programming. GlobalScholar is a member of the Knowledge Universe family of companies. For more information, visit www.globalscholar.com or phone 800-473-4572.

Contacts

GlobalScholar
Eileen Demers
800-473-4572
edemers at globalscholar dot com
www.globalscholar.com

C. Blohm & Associates, Inc.
Sandy Fash
608-839-9800
sandy at cblohm dot com
www.cblohm.com

Printer Friendly

Download Release (160 KB)

Images

Click to view at full size, then right-click to download.