Tell us about your experience using AppSheet
Eric Woodhouse: Hello. My name is Eric Woodhouse and I am the programmer analyst for Hemet Unified School District. We are a K-12 public education entity located in southern California with a student enrollment of about 22,000 and a staff of approximately 3500. Our mission is to embrace, educate and empower every student every day. Our organization strives for continuous improvement and to be in a proactive state rather than reactive. Thus, we are always looking for tools and methods to improve our systems. In the public school system, there are many different systems that we have to use for the benefit of our district, but it was very difficult to tie all the systems together. In addition, we need custom solutions to fulfill the needs of specialized departments and grant funded entities. Appsheet seemed like a good solution for us. I have been using AppSheet for some time and like the data display functionality of it, as well as email notifications, text notifications and the ability to use code to customize the program as much as we want. There are so many options within AppSheet now, that we can create solutions that will fit our needs. Based on user feedback, the most useful app that has been deployed is a student reporting dashboard that I created and named Total Student. Total Student uses over 40 million fields of data from multiple tables and combines them into one student record, so administrators and district personnel are able to see an entire student's academic performance in one singular view, instead of having to log in to multiple locations. Having that ability to link in multiple data points to give us one complete view allows us to have a better understanding of how to help our students to graduate and be college and career ready. AnotherAppSheet program we have developed was able to find mismatched data between our student information system and state reporting. AppSheet was able to give a good visualization of our district statistics in relation to our state reporting, as well as show us any data mismatch we have. The benefits we have realized include accurate, easily accessible data to monitor. We monitor daily student counts, Saturday school eligibility, overall grades, clear indicators for at-risk students, average GPA of students special program results, we have the ability to email all teachers of a secondary school student, daily update of all students in the district by school and monitoring students so that they are college and career ready. With the inclusion of database models, bots for notifications and now chatbots- the versatility has grown so much that AppSheet will be utilized extensively in future products. Currently we have an app under development that will allow users to create custom groups and then send a tailored message via email and SMS to any of our organization groups. We expect this to better streamline those communications to save our staff considerable time and effort.
