As part of the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) new public awareness campaign, #RethinkDiscipline, Blue Raster launched The Hidden Cost of Suspension story map in partnership with Sanametrix. Since 2011, the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice have collected data on suspensions, expulsions, and other practices that remove students from instruction. To make their data comprehensible at a glance by… Read More
Blue Raster has long recognized the importance of putting exploration tools into the hands of science enthusiasts. So we were excited to collaborate on a joint project with Bear Trust International, a non-profit dedicated to conservation education. As part of their STEM program, Bear Trust asked Blue Raster to create an engaging web lesson plan rooted in… Read More
Did you know that websites you visit every day, such as weather.com, are powered by open data from government agencies? Large amounts of government data are available on sites like data.gov, but often organizations have difficulty finding the relevant datasets. Open data initiatives like MapED Open Data provide authoritative, ready-to-use data driving many private-sector applications on… Read More
Blue Raster is pleased to announce a new release of the REL Midwest’s EdMaps, an interactive web mapping application that helps education stakeholders think spatially about education issues affecting their communities. Initially launched in January 2014, EdMaps enables users to visualize and analyze complex, geographically linked education data through easy-to-use story maps. The updated application features… Read More
Blue Raster is proud to have produced the Future Ready video for the White House ConnectED conference on Wednesday in partnership with All4Ed. The standing-room-only East Room was abuzz with more than 120 superintendents “signing the pledge”. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama addressed the invited guests. Enjoy a brief highlight of the… Read More
The Census Mapping program at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) – U.S. Department of Education has just released MapED, a new online mapping platform developed by Blue Raster and partner, Sanametrix, to visualize education and census data across the country. The platform unites NCES and CENSUS datasets with GIS mapping capabilities. The general public… Read More
After two years of planning and preparation, on September 15, 2014 the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) successfully completed migration of its on-premises datacenter to the Amazon Web Services GovCloud region. As an Amazon Consulting Partner, Blue Raster led the effort to consolidate IES’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) ArcGIS servers from a hybrid… Read More
Beginning in November 2013, school districts across the United States will be able to draw, upload, or update previous year school boundaries in a web-editing application as part of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Blue Raster developed NCES’s online feature-drawing and editing application using Esri’s ArcGIS for Server and JavaScript… Read More
Blue Raster and partner, Sanametrix, are pleased to present the Demographic Profile Viewer. This is the newest addition to the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) School District Demographics System (SDDS). It provides: Policymakers, education professionals, and the public a unique way to better understand patterns in our school systems. Visualization of key demographic data… Read More
It is an exciting year for the School District Demographics System (SDDS), which was developed by Blue Raster for the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). There are many new data updates including an initial release of School Boundary files. The announcement was made at the Esri Education GIS Conference in San Diego… Read More