If you’re an administrator in career and technical education (CTE), you’re always looking for insights to help you refine your program and provide better opportunities for teachers and students. It's one of the core parts of my job as CTE Director at City View ISD in Texas.
City View is one of many districts across the country that have turned to Eduthings to enhance CTE data management and plan for the future.
But how exactly can you go about implementing Eduthings in your CTE program? And how can optimizing data management lead to better outcomes for your teachers and students?
In this article, you’ll find four tricks and tips for implementing Eduthings in your CTE program:
- School Board Reporting
- Funding and Accountability
- Certification Reports
- Attendance
After reading, you’ll have a better idea of the steps involved in successfully implementing Eduthings so you can focus on the future of your CTE program!
1. School Board Reporting
CTE Directors and school administrators are required to submit regular reports to their school boards. Since boards want to understand how your CTE program is performing, it’s critical to include data that proves the value of your CTE pathways and their ongoing success in preparing students for rewarding careers.
For our school board meetings at City View ISD, I create a document directly using data and graphs from Eduthings so our board is aware of exactly what is going on in our program and where and how we’re using funding to help learners succeed.
Eduthings integrates directly with our student information systems (SIS) and synchronizes data nightly, so I always have the most updated figures whenever I need to present data to our school board.
When I present at a school board meeting, I’ve found that providing graphs for our directors helps them visualize and understand our performance data.
In school board reports, I like to highlight our program using a few Eduthings reports that provide meaningful insight into how we are performing:
- The Code Actual report helps administrators and school directors track student intent codes to understand CTE enrollment at any given time.
- The Funding Contact Hours report is useful because it shows how many students are in each class and pathway, and the current funding level for that pathway.
- Meanwhile, the Cluster Overview and CCMR Overview give a clear view of student distribution by career cluster and to see where students are with CCMR status at any given time.
We use Eduthings reports to ensure students are meeting program requirements and are ready for graduation. However, integrating Eduthings into our school board reports has also helped us grow our program through better accountability and increased funding.
2. Funding and Accountability
Continued funding is the lifeblood of any CTE program. It’s essential to provide resources for students, grow programs, and provide for new opportunities and equipment that helps teachers and learners succeed.
At City View ISD, Eduthings plays a key role in our CTE program’s accountability to the school board and state officials. Through improving data reliability with Eduthings, we’ve been able to prove our program’s jump in CTE program enrollment.
Eduthings gives us a clear count of how many students are in each program, which helps us answer questions surrounding course allotment. Our data shows us clearly when it’s worth continuing to offer specific CTE courses, and when our resources are better served elsewhere.
In Texas, 55 percent of CTE funding must be allocated to program-related expenses. Eduthings also helps us determine our teacher efficiency rates to ensure that we comply with our state requirements for both materials and CTE instructors.
Ultimately, the growth of our program—and our ability to demonstrate specific program needs through Eduthings—has led to our CTE program doubling its funding.
By confidently presenting your program’s success using reliable data, you can open your program to additional funding opportunities that will help your program build for tomorrow.
3. Certification Reports
Reporting on industry certifications is one of the most essential functions of a CTE administrator. With state departments of education placing a heightened emphasis on a school's ability to prepare learners for industry-based certifications, it’s essential that CTE programs have the data they need to demonstrate learner success.
Eduthings allows administrators and teachers to upload and track each of the credentials they offer, along with the specific CTE pathways that align with the certification.
At City View ISD, I allow teachers to go directly into Eduthings whenever they’re ready to certify learners. They can upload certifications as a PDF as soon as they are complete.
It’s worth noting that some states and localities offer incentives for teachers and schools with a high pass rate for industry-based certifications. We offer a retention stipend of $5,000 to any teacher who has a 70 percent student pass rate on an industry certification. If your state offers additional district or teacher incentives, you can use Eduthings certification reports to showcase your pass rate and earn additional funding or a stipend.
Tracking certification reports is especially helpful in calculating College, Career, and Military Readiness (CCMR) status. Since industry certifications contribute to CCMR status, maintaining an active record of which students have earned certifications will help you know which learners have achieved CCMR status, and who is close to earning or missing a CCMR point.
Allowing teachers to track certifications directly in Eduthings can save you time and provide accurate data on one of the most important measures of your program’s success.
4. Attendance
Finally, I’ve found that Eduthings can serve as a reliable tool for tracking and reporting student attendance throughout the school year.
While most schools have some sort of attendance system already in place, the nature of CTE programs sometimes makes it more difficult to track student attendance. Between field experiences, work-based learning (WBL) programs, and lab settings, managing attendance at CTE events can sometimes be more difficult than it looks.
Using Eduthings, you can create individual events for each opportunity taking place in your CTE program.
At City View ISD, an advising teacher might create an event for each time a chapter of a career and technical student organization has a meeting. This way, we’ll know how many learners and instructors attend events as you plan for upcoming gatherings.
When you familiarize your teachers with how to set up events in advance, they’ll be able to submit data for their individual classes and CTSO chapters. This makes it simple for individual instructors to track attendance, allowing you and fellow administrators to focus on analysis and decision-making.
And again, because Eduthings synchronizes nightly with your existing student information systems (SIS), you can be confident that your attendance data is reliable and ready for use in reports to your school board and state department of education.
Enhance Your Data Management with Eduthings Today
Eduthings has made a real difference in how we operate our CTE program at City View ISD, especially in the four key areas of school board reports, funding and accountability, certification reports, and attendance.
When you implement Eduthings to enhance your data management, you’ll help your district streamline data management for CTE so you can discover valuable insights that will help you plan the future of your program.
Now that you’ve learned some tips to help you strengthen your data management, you may still be wondering: is Eduthings right for my program?
Find out everything you need to know about how Eduthings could work in your specific situation when you sign up for a free demo.
During your personalized demo, you’ll learn how Eduthings works with your existing information systems to create a secure solution to meet your program’s needs.
