Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Edsby Introduces ‘Perspective Analyze’ to Help Teachers Make Evidence-Based Instructional Decisions

ANDOVER, MASS (June 2, 2022) –  Edsby®, the award-winning social learning environment designed for K–12 education, today introduced  Perspective Analyze, helping teachers make informed decisions based on multi-dimensional assessment data. The new tool offers teachers visibility into several types of student assessments, integrating both learning evidence and gradebook scores within one place in the Edsby platform.

Edsby’s new Analyze view enables teachers to visualize student performance through a new lens to spot trends, patterns and areas of concern—helping teachers act on instructional decisions for individual students or groups of students. This new extension within Edsby classes gives teachers broader access to classroom-level analytics at no additional cost.

“I’m excited about this new feature as it will help teachers visualize data in new and powerful ways,” said Joe McRae, Math and Computer Science Program Area Leader at Lakefield College School. “It will help me assess students against course learning goals throughout the year and identify opportunities where students can improve. I look forward to building my assessments with this in mind next year.”…Read More

Edsby Introduces New Social Emotional Check-Ins for K–12 School Districts and Regions

ANDOVER, MASS (August 23, 2021) – Edsby®, a multi award-winning, next generation K–12 learning management system (LMS), today introduced a new system enabling teachers to understand their students’ emotional states in and out of the classroom by giving students a systematic way to share how they’re feeling. The new feature augments a series of capabilities in Edsby focused on student well-being.

Students choose from animated icons representing emotions, color-coded for their intensity level and how pleasant the emotion is, either once per day or even per class, based on educator preference. Emotion options are tailored to students’ grade levels, along with developmentally appropriate definitions. Age-appropriate regulation strategies curated by experts are also presented for each emotion.

Teachers see the emotions their students are experiencing, and can monitor patterns and trends over time, which can help draw attention to students who may need additional support. Teachers see which emotional regulation strategies have been presented to each student and receive their own professionally curated strategies based on what their students are feeling. They can engage students in conversations and are able to take actions consistent with the district or region’s existing protocols to ensure student well-being, ranging from the ability to loop in a school guidance counselor or other professionals as required.…Read More

Edsby K-12 LMS incorporates Microsoft Teams and Zoom real-time video, chat and whiteboarding

New EdsbyLive capability makes synchronous learning easier and safer for K-12 students and educators

ONTARIO, Canada (May 6th, 2021) – Edsby®, a multi award-winning, next generation K-12 learning management system (LMS), has introduced new built-in support for popular platforms to enable simpler and more secure real time synchronous learning in hybrid or online-only environments. A new EdsbyLive feature now programmatically connects Edsby classes to popular real-time online meeting services.

EdsbyLive initially supports Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and all of the rich, real-time video, chat, whiteboarding and other capabilities they offer. EdsbyLive has been built to be platform-agnostic, and support for other systems is planned in the future.

Once configured to use a school district or region’s official platform, teachers receive new “Go Live Now” buttons in their Edsby classes. These buttons launch online meetings and make them available only at the time a teacher has requested it, and only to students in the class. If configured by the district, only authenticated users may participate in meetings, and only with their real names, minimizing the chance of unauthorized intrusions.…Read More

Edsby making cloud service available on Microsoft Azure

Forthcoming cloud service from Edsby will build on earlier integration work

Edsby, a cloud-based learning management system for K-12 school districts that connects teachers, parents and students using modern technologies, will soon be available on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s hyperscale, enterprise-grade cloud platform, as part of a global relationship between the two companies.

Edsby will be making its Edsby cloud service available in Azure data centers in the U.S. for American customers. In Canada, Microsoft Corp. recently announced plans to establish Azure cloud data centers in Ontario and Quebec and Edsby will be available in these Canadian facilities in time for the 2016-2017 school year. Shortly after, Edsby will be made available in Azure data centers in Australia, Europe and elsewhere.

“By utilizing Microsoft’s global network of Azure data centers, we can streamline how we provide Edsby in multiple regions around the world. This also enables us to meet customers’ regional or national data sovereignty requirements,” said John Myers, Edsby President. “In addition, the dynamic scalability and high availability of Azure will enable Edsby to scale to handle the millions of new users required by provincial, state and national level deployments.”…Read More

Hillsborough County Schools reveals 99.98% uptime with LMS

A new system leads to improved outcomes and other revealing data

LMS-uptimeUsing a new purpose-built learning management system, Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida—the country’s eighth largest district—has released data revealing 99.98 percent uptime and significant utilization of the system in the first half of the 2014-15 academic year.

The results are a significant improvement from Hillsborough County’s previous system. Data shows an average of 100,000 Hillsborough students, parents and teachers login to the system, Edsby, at least once a week. The system serves an average of 20 million requests every school day, with an independently measured response time averaging only 280 milliseconds. Usage data also shows that 47 percent of logins are from mobile platforms.

“Based on sheer numbers and scale of the operation, Hillsborough County is one of the most significant enterprise software deployment successes in K-12,” said Steven Asbury, vice president of engineering at Edsby. “The district can manage a massive amount of information and has shown that the LMS contributes to parental involvement and academic achievement. Students, parents and teachers are very clearly using the system, unlike other programs which end up as shelfware.”…Read More