Miami-Dade County Schools Picks Microsoft

Fourth-largest U.S. school district deploys Microsoft's online portal, bringing together 1.5 million constituents in collaborative learning; evidence of growing trend in ed tech approach

When Miami-Dade County Public Schools needed to communicate with its 1.5 million students, parents, teachers and administrators, the district found it lacked a consistent way to deliver information. Whether they needed educational resources being distributed or critical instructions in case of emergencies, users were forced to hunt for necessary information. The use of different software applications throughout hundreds of schools kept this large, urban and culturally diverse school district from effectively using the communications and educational resources it had at its disposal.

Today the school district is introducing the deployment of a new solution using the Microsoft Learning Gateway, an integrated portal-based platform that delivers an unprecedented level of collaboration, management of online content and increased productivity by eliminating the need for paper while changing the way people work, learn and succeed across the school district.

"It's the difference between walking into a grocery store and having to search the aisles for what you need and being able to drive up to a store and everything is already in a cart ready to check out," said Deborah Karcher, executive officer, information technology services, Miami-Dade County Public Schools. "We were supporting a lot of different technology platforms and nonconnected Web sites to access and deliver information.

This reduced our communications effectiveness and did not maximize the resources we had. By optimizing our infrastructure with Microsoft, we were able to design a portal strategy across the district that can incorporate all our application and data sources through Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and a suite of Web services that allows security-enhanced access to all district resources based on a user's role in the system."

The district can now push the right data to the right stakeholder audience rather than forcing users to navigate a maze of resources to find the information they need:

- The school district now communicates time-sensitive information such as emergency notices, school events and school closures to all district users with just one communiqué, which is critical in this hurricane-prone region.

- The new infrastructure changes the way that teachers and parents can access and make use of student performance data. Teachers now can readily access historical data about individual student performance for assessments, progress reports and remediation plans and more quickly capture a snapshot of a student's overall progress.

- Administrators can communicate consistent information to staff members across all schools regarding meetings, training and professional development opportunities.

- Instructional technology from the district's digital content provider Riverdeep, which converted its Learning Village solution specifically to work within the district's new portal solution, now allows teachers, students and parents to access learning resources anytime and anywhere they are needed.

- Parents can set their user settings to receive the information they want in the language they need without having to navigate through numerous district services.

"We realized that to communicate effectively with parents and the community, we would need tools that permit our stakeholders to move decisively in support of their children - our students," said Rudolph F. "Rudy" Crew, Ed.D., superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools. "These tools must work together in such a way as to convert a parent's need to know into the ability to act, and we now find ourselves moving decisively in that direction" - Microsoft.