North Carolina

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction has entered into a ten-year contract to put in place a statewide student information management system. This system, called the North Carolina Window of Information for Student Education (NCWISE) will replace the current application, SIMS, that has been used by the schools in North Carolina for fifteen years. In addition to providing schools with a student information management system, the NCWISE system will provide the school district with the access to the district data that is needed for reporting, accountability, and decision-making. State reporting will be streamlined with the inclusion of an operational data store that will be used as a staging area for the merging of data pulled from each school by an ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Loading) tool, Informatica. A sophisticated, web-based notification and approval system is being implemented to assure that the data pulled has been approved at appropriate levels before being pushed to the state level. The data pulled for state reporting will be published in a state data warehouse, accessible by authorized school, district, and state users. Summary views of the data will be made available to other state agencies and the public as appropriate.

The NCWISE solution is composed of a suite of software products. The school/district component is a commercial product called SIS (Student Information System) by Administrative Assistant's Ltd. The Oracle Relational Database Management System is the backbone of the system, with the databases housed in data centers at a centralized location. In addition, web-based Oracle tools will be used for reporting throughout the state. Currently, users access the application through the Internet using a thin client installed on their desktop.

North Carolina is in the pilot phase of the project, with twenty-two sites utilizing the solution at the current time. The pilot implementation includes 1500 users, from teachers to the Superintendent in each of the three pilot districts. After certification of the Phase I NCWISE solution, Phase II will start with an eventual roll-out of the remainder of the schools in the state over a three-year period of time.

NC WISE OWL is a North Carolina Department of Public Instruction-designed Web site that has, as its centerpiece, several subscription databases. InfoTrac, a 4 separate periodical databases product by the Gale Group; and two encyclopedias: Grolier's The New Book of Knowledge for elementary and middle school students, and Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia for middle and high school students. Additionally, Gale's DISCovering Authors: Most Studied, a database featuring information about 392 of the most studied authors in the middle and high school curricula, is included as well as the Gale Professional Collection and the Gale Custom Newspapers databases.

NC WISE OWL is divided into five separate areas: Student, Teacher, Reference, Media and Technology, and Parents. The Student area features a variety of Web sites that relate both to the North Carolina Standard Course of Study and to student interests. The Teacher area focuses on WebQuests that supplement the curriculum and NCwin, online courses that will help teachers meet the state's technology requirements. The Media and Technology area focuses on information for the state's media and technology professionals and features the online version of IMPACT, North Carolina's guidelines for media and technology programs. The Reference area provides the subscription databases described above and student-friendly search engines. Parents even have their own area on NC WISE OWL, which features Web sites that encourage them to help their children with homework and simple Internet searching.

NC WISE OWL is a partial answer to the question: "Now that we have the Internet, what do we do with it?" Obviously, making the subscription databases available to every public school-and home--with Internet access helps us address the issue of the digital divide. Every student and teacher, regardless of economic status or geographical location, has access to several substantial, reliable resources for research. Additionally, aggregating many other carefully evaluated, child-specific Web sites assists teachers and parents in providing appropriate resources for the K-12 community.

NC WISE OWL has been funded for the past 2 years with state and TLCF Administrative dollars. The Department of Public Instruction and State Board of Education is requesting that $1.5 million in recurring money be appropriated for NC WISE OWL during the next session of the North Carolina General Assembly for future continuation and expansion of this valuable statewide resource.

Contact
Frances Bradburn
Director, Instructional Technology
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
301 North Wilmington Street
Raleigh, NC 27601-2825
919-715-1530 (p)  919-715-4762 (f)
E-mail: fbradbur@dpi.state.nc.us