Home Base Partnership TeamPurpose/Scope of Work/Updates

Partnership Aims

• Work directly with LEAs to support the use of the instructional tools and resources within Home Base

• Document best practices and lessons learned and share with all districts and charters

Serving All Districts and Schools

• Fostering Connections

Flagship LEAs Emerging LEAs

The Work

• Sharing Best Practices

• Building Local Networks

• Providing Support

• Growing the Instructional Tools

Region 1 Partners

BertieElizabeth City PasquotankGatesCurrituck (Pending)Hertford County (First Year)

Providing Support

• Discover issues that the LEAs are encountering

• Share known resolutions or training/support materials

• Work with the Home Base Support Center staff, DPI and Pearson implementation teams toward resolution of any outstanding issues

Growing the Instructional Tools

• Learn about and share enhancement requests

• Bring information about content that LEAs would like to see included in Home Base to DPI instructional and assessment content teams

Schoolnet Benchmark Assessments Update

December 11, 2014

Schoolnet Technical Disruptions from October

• Schoolnet database was overloaded and overburdened

• Schoolnet excessive load was caused by:– High volume of Assessments - A significant number of

users taking assessments all at once– Assessment Reporting – Teachers running reports at the

same time as students were taking assessments • Student Web Part used to see the results of her/his

assessment• Classroom Web Part associated with the teacher’s landing

page – Static content (i.e. images and javascript files) -

Individual requests were forced to load each time

Schoolnet Technical Improvements for December and January

• Up to 90 “minor” optimizations and enhancements have been applied to version 16.0

• There are three “major” improvements which will distribute and balance the load on Schoolnet:– Assessments - Created a dedicated database instance to serve the

assessment administration activities – Assessment Reporting – Created a read-only database instance to

serve selected reporting activities – Static Content - Added a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which

will place static content closer to the requester without placing additional burden on the application servers

Schoolnet Assessment Recommendations for December and January

• Do Assessment Reporting only before or after school so that reporting activities do not compete with assessment activities

• Develop contingency plans in the event of service disruption of online assessment delivery – Print bubble sheets as a backup so that assessments

can be given via paper and pencil if you encounter issues with delivery of online assessments.

– Consider scheduling assessments in the late afternoon rather than during 8:30 – 11:30 AM (when the system is under excessive load).

Schoolnet Assessments by the Numbers• Even with the problems we have encountered during the October benchmark

assessments, LEAs were successful in completing a record number of online assessments.

• Expectation is to provide greater stability and reliability to meet increasing user demand• Numbers below as of 10/31/2014

School Year/Type Total Assessments Completed Completed Online Online %

2013-2014 1,375,409 827,622 60.2%

District Benchmark 1,367,083 819,691 60.0%

District Benchmark NCEXTEND2 869 480 55.2%

School Assessment NCEXTEND2 113 113 100.0%

State Benchmark 7,344 7,338 99.9%

2014-2015 1,027,470 726,283 70.7%

District Benchmark 666,524 395,751 59.4%

School Assessment NCEXTEND2 8 8 100.0%

State Benchmark 360,938 330,524 91.6%

Grand Total 2,402,879 1,553,905 64.7%

Schoolnet Plans

• Use Optimized and Enhanced Schoolnet Version 16.0 for December and January Benchmark Assessments

• Migrate to Schoolnet Version 16.2 in spring 2015. – Migrates Assessment Administration functions from SQL

Server to “Cassandra” database, which is a much more scalable database platform.

– Includes additional optimizations and functionality• Monitor the deployment and performance of Schoolnet

Version 16.2 with Cassandra in other state instances• Conduct extensive functional and load tests of version

16.2 in an upgraded NC test environment that mimics production

Links

• Regular updates in the Biweekly (sign up) listsncdpi.weebly.com/homebase-list.html and see archives at 

• http://www.ncpublicschools.org/homebase/updates/biweekly/?year=2014.

• Technical Updates• http://www.ncpublicschools.org/homebase/status/.

Other Links

• https://powersource.pearsonschoolsystems.com/home/main.action

“To build a solution that works it is valuable to know what does not work.”

Team Assignments:

Regions 1 and 2 – Dr. Shelly HunterRegions 3 and 5 – Mr. Adam SurganRegions 4 and 6 – Mrs. Mak KushunRegions 7 and 8 – Ms. Terri Gullick