How Duarte Unified School District Manages Remote Learning with Absolute

When the Coronavirus pandemic broke and students and teachers around the globe were asked to instantly adapt to a new distance learning phenomenon, the entire Duarte Unified School District in Los Angeles County California rallied around an evolved success model.

Serving the educational needs of student scholars at the elementary, middle and high school levels, Duarte’s vision is to produce 21st Century scholars by providing students with the knowledge, skills and inspiration to be successful in college, career and life. Because technology is one of those critical skills and a powerful learning tool, Duarte already had in place a robust one-to-one computing program.

But then the COVID-19 outbreak hit and forced a new and unexpected learn-from-home environment on everyone. The district had to make some quick decisions including what constitutes effective and efficient web usage.

“During these challenging times, everyone stepped up for the benefit of our kids,” said Eric Ramos, Duarte USD Chief Technology Officer.

As Duarte scholars and teachers transitioned to remote learning, Ramos and his team were busy figuring out which web applications and learning tools would be needed in what priority order, amongst the seemingly countless freemium app offers that were coming in. For insight into overall device usage, what web applications are being used, how often, and for how long, Duarte USD turned to Absolute Web Usage.

Introducing the General Availability of Absolute Web Usage
Absolute Web Usage helps K-12 educational institutions stand up, monitor, manage and measure distance learning programs. The console provides district leadership, IT and educators with an undeletable tether to school-owned devices and a single source of truth into student device, application, and online use. Duarte has used it for their learn-from-home program across 15,000 devices.

With Web Usage in place, Duarte’s IT leadership can measure how engaged their scholars are with online curriculum. The reporting also provides detailed insights for Duarte to navigate better learning outcomes by identifying valuable or underused learning resources in order to build future budgetary plans. The tool also highlights risky websites with potential CIPA compliance violations, ensuring Duarte school administrators can protect the safety of their students online.

Duarte USD also relies on a web filter however that data only shows which web sites were visited, not how long students actively engaged on that site. For an IT staff that is already stretched too thin, they need easy access to more insightful reports that can help drive meaningful decisions within the district. Absolute Web Usage reports give IT insight into the details of what’s being viewed so they can address potential issues from the start and, for compliance purposes, demonstrate proof.

“The weekly snapshots allow me to dive deeper and investigate websites that have high traffic as well as those websites that seem to have bypassed our web filter,” Ramos said. “With the addition of multiple fields pulled from the Google Suite admin, we can really drill down to the highest priorities at any given time, saving my team valuable time when investigating."