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Tulsa School District offers interactive digital budget book with chatbot
Summary
The Tulsa School District published an interactive digital budget book, demonstrated in a short instructional video, that lets users navigate by chapter or page, view hoverable charts with dollar amounts, and query the document using a built-in chat assistant.
A presenter in a district video said the Tulsa School District has posted an interactive digital budget book online and walked viewers through its features.
"The point of this video is to show you how to navigate the Tulsa School District's digital budget book," the presenter said, demonstrating the front page, a left-hand table of contents and options to navigate page-by-page or jump to specific chapters.
The video shows that the first chapters are static PDFs or Word documents but that most of the budget is presented in interactive charts and tables best viewed on a desktop. The presenter warns that exporting the tool to PDF will remove interactive hover text and other features: "If you were to download in PDF, you wouldn't have that."
Charts in the tool include hover-over labels and values: the presenter points to a pie chart that displays local revenue sources with dollar amounts when hovered over and says graphs are typically followed by detailed budget information so users can move from visual summaries to line-item detail.
The demonstration highlights a built-in chat assistant that searches the budget book on request. "I can just say what is the total cost of salaries and benefits," the presenter said, then clicked to show the assistant locating the general fund salaries and benefits figure and providing a link to the relevant pages.
The presenter also tested a query for special education costs and encouraged viewers to use the chat feature. "We're able to we can't track who's using this, but it does give us feedback on the types of questions that are getting asked," the presenter said, adding that patterns in questions will help the district prepare and distribute answers to commonly asked items.
The video closes with brief instructions on closing the assistant and expanding the view to restore the table of contents.
Contact information, publication date for the tool and additional metadata were not specified in the video.
