Department of Education

ED Moves ArcGIS Servers to Amazon’s GovCloud

Posted on by Christina Nordling

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 on-premise/private cloud-hosted environment to their AWS GovCloud account.

AWS GovCloud

The GIS servers are built using Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with Esri ArcGIS Server and SQL Server. These servers power the newly released MapED website, as well as the NCES’s School District Demographic System mapping application, a national survey effort that includes a GIS feature editing application to collect school attendance areas.

Designed specifically to meet the needs of U.S. government agencies, the AWS GovCloud (US) framework allows agencies, contractors, and customers to migrate sensitive workloads into the cloud while adhering to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) as well as the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMPSM) requirements.

Contact us today to learn more about migrating ArcGIS server workflows to Amazon Web Services.

National School Boundaries – Attendance Area Maps

Posted on by Amy Ramsdell

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 API. One of the biggest challenges was offering a customized editing toolset for the non-technical district representatives who best know their school attendance areas.

School Attendance Boundary Survey 2013-2014 School Year

Once processed, the school boundaries will be freely available for visualization and download on the NCES School District Demographics System website.  By providing the public with detailed boundary information, it will be possible for the public, researchers, and policy makers to examine relationships between schools covering many demographic, social and economic indices.

NCES has initiated this 2013 School Attendance Boundary Survey (SABS) with support from the U.S Census Bureau, to collect school boundaries for the 13,000+ U.S. school districts. This represents more than 100,000 public elementary and secondary schools from the Common Core of Data (CCD) school universe.

Blue Raster has delivered innovative data-visualization techniques for NCES using the latest Esri ArcGIS-for-Server technologies, ArcGIS Online offerings, Python and many JavaScript tools such as data-driven documents (d3.js) .

New Department of Education Profile Viewer: Mapping Our Nation’s School District Demographics

Posted on by Adrienne Allegretti

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 within school districts for the entire nation.
  • Around 600 economic and social characteristics from the U.S. Census Bureau‘s 2006-2010 American Community Survey (ACS) profile data and 2010 Decennial Census.
  • Percentage estimates, including margins of error, which accounts for variations in population for educational maps.

Demographic Profile Viewer
A wide variety of custom maps can be created from the local to the national level for analysis. This application uses the new Esri ArcGIS Server 10.1 dynamic map functionality for instant rendering of almost 14,000 school districts.

In addition, the application is written in HTML5 using ArcGIS Server JavaScript API with ArcGIS Online basemaps and Geosearch functionality for the tool’s location finder. The Demographic Profile Viewer was developed to work on mobile and desktop devices seamlessly.

Future updates include incorporation of 2007-2011 aggregate ACS data and map printing capabilities.

Introducing the School Boundaries Geodatabase

Posted on by Jessica Viel

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 where Blue Raster’s Michael Lippmann and Brendan Collins presented NCES School District Mapping.

The School Boundaries Geodatabase displays data for the 350 largest school districts based on enrollment, which is approximately 20% of the nation’s schools and approximately 38% of the nation’s students.  The goal is to include the data for all school districts by 2015.  Developed using ArcGIS Server 10.1, the School Boundaries Geodatabase compliments the existing education statistics available through NCES.

School District Demographics System

NCES School District Mapping – 2012 Esri International User Conference

WISEmaps Puts New Focus on Wisconsin Education Data

Posted on by Jessica Viel

Wisconsin educators, policy makers and parents now have a new way to visualize and analyze the state’s education data and trends.  WISEmaps is an interactive mapping application developed by Blue Raster in collaboration with REL Midwest (Midwest Regional Educational Laboratories) and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), for the purpose of sharing Wisconsin education data with the public in a compelling way.

The application, which is part of DPI’s Wisconsin Information System for Education (WISE), was built by Blue Raster using Esri ArcGIS API for Flex.  WISEmaps gives citizens the opportunity to examine Wisconsin education and demographic statistics at the school, district, city or county level.  The data includes more than 5,000 indicators, including statistics regarding enrollment, math and reading assessments, and high school completion rates.

WISEmaps features a split screen function, which makes it easy for users to compare multiple maps, view trends across time, or identify correlations among datasets.  To enhance their maps, users can choose options such as color scheme, layer transparency and map type (street level, topographic, canvas or satellite imagery).  The customized maps can be exported as images or PDF files or shared via Twitter.

WISEmaps

 

This application has been taken offline.

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