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Tag: American Community Survey (ACS)

REL EdMaps Helps Analyze School Data in the Midwest

How has poverty changed in the Midwest region since 2000? This question as well as others related to education priorities in the Midwest can be answered with the REL Midwest’s newly launched EdMaps.

EdMaps is a mapping application that displays educational data as “story maps” with the focus of building knowledge across the REL’s four educational priority areas. Built by Blue Raster, EdMaps helps users analyze publicly available school- and district-level data, observe trends over time and frame conversations on practice and policy.

REL Midwest EdMaps

In its initial debut, EdMaps includes story maps on graduation rates and poverty levels and future releases of the application will allow a choice of data to overlay and compare over time.

Matt Burke, project leader, says:

We believe that education stakeholders throughout our region will benefit greatly from being able to identify and compare particular schools, districts, and states, observe trends over time and demographic shifts, and create custom data displays from a wide variety of publicly available data. We hope that EdMaps will serve as a useful tool to help frame conversations on practice and policy, and the development of this tool would not have been possible without the knowledgeable and skillful staff at Blue Raster.

The data is delivered by ArcGIS for Server deployed in the Amazon Cloud and uses the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. School District data trends are leveraging with the Dojo Toolkit and HighCharts API.

To view the application, visit http://www.relmidwest.org/edmaps.

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

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.


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