Duval County Public Schools recently unveiled a new online portal that will go into effect in early July.
OneView, a platform developed with support from Microsoft and input from local users, will make it easier for parents and students to interact with schools.
With unique portals for students, parents, and administrators, OneView is intended to fill a wide variety of needs.
Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of Duval County Public Schools, said, for example, students can track their grades and use features to develop project management skills. Parents will be able to communicate with other parents and teachers, as well as fill out forms electronically. Administrators can collect students’ performance data and access training resources.
Vitti said the project, which cost $6.1 mil, was funded in part through a federal bond, which was made possible through a matching grant from local partner Quality Education for All Fund. District funds will be used to fund maintenance and additional future development.
Alfred I. Dupont Middle School piloted the program over the past year. Jakob Young, a rising eighth-grader there, likes that everything is in one place.
“For our grades we would have to go to FOCUS, and then for all of our different assignments and stuff, it would really depend on the teacher where they would have that information,” said Young about the various online databases students currently have to navigate. “It was very difficult to remember all the different passwords and stuff because each teacher would make a different password.”
His principal, Marilyn Barnwell, uses OneView to take proactive measures in reaching out to struggling students.
“I like the idea of having quick access to my student’s reading data and also to their math data in terms of proficiency,” she said. “We like to look at whether or not our students have shown growth, and so we’re able to get in there quickly and problem-solve and put safety nets in place for students so that we can help them to reach proficiency.”
OneView will soon replace hard copy planners for many students, even though technology in the classroom can easily become a distraction. But Carmen Polanco, a teacher at Dupont Middle School, said she’s not worried about that.
“When they are in the classroom, there are rituals and routines that we, as teachers, develop for everything, and the technology was just one more thing that you develop a ritual and routine around. Once the children are used to those routines, they know exactly what to do,” she said. “That becomes not a concern, but just one more thing that they do in the classroom, like if they were going to pick up a textbook or anything else.”
Although it is heralded as a parental communication solution, OneView also calls to attention Duval County’s technology divide. Barnwell, the principal, estimates that about 30 percent of her students may not have access to the internet outside of school. This leads to the question of whether their parents will be able to take advantage of the new system.
Barnwell also added that she would like to eventually see a language option incorporated into the program to address the needs of non-native English speakers. The district has an English for Speakers of Other Languages, or ESOL, program, she points out, indicating a need for this component.