Florida Virtual School migrates to Brightspace

Florida Virtual School (FLVS), a statewide public school district in the state of Florida and international provider of education products and services, has selected D2L, a global learning technology provider, to deploy its Brightspace platform as the district’s new learning management system (LMS).

FLVS, the largest fully accredited online state public school in the U.S., had nearly 400,000 completed semester enrollments in the 2015-16 academic year.

The Brightspace platform includes a number of advantages that were key elements in its selection by FLVS. Since the platform incorporates personalized learning, teachers can deliver their lessons with much greater flexibility and give each student the personal experience they need to succeed. Brightspace was designed with modern students in mind and offers a clean, responsive user experience as well as integrated social media, chat and advanced video features.…Read More

The simple LMS move that has made our teachers more effective

Migrating to a single platform for assessment, data analysis, and instruction has simplified most everything for one district

Teachers today are responsible for so many things.

They have to plan instruction for all of their classes. They have to tie this instruction to rigorous state and national standards. They have to assess their students’ understanding on an ongoing basis, look at what the data say, and adjust their teaching based on the results. They have to differentiate instruction for every child. They have to foster deeper understanding among their students, addressing not only core content standards but also key 21st century skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving.

Teachers can’t do all of that if they’re constantly logging out of one software system and into another. It’s far too much for them to manage.…Read More

Pearson Realize course content now works with any LMS

Interoperability certification gives teachers, students freedom to assign and use any Pearson content regardless of LMS

Pearson announced a new iteration of its main content delivery system for K-12 schools that will allow them to experience learning, assessment and data applications seamlessly, saving thousands of hours and dollars in the process. Traditionally, teachers, students and administrators have to deal with multiple logins and repetitive data entry. Pearson Realize is now fully compatible with IMS Global’s Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI™) standards, making almost all of the company’s K-12 content and data easy to use, access and analyze, regardless of the school’s learning management system (LMS).

IMS Global is a non-profit organization that sets standards for digital educational content. Leading IMS members like Pearson are committed to creating content and applications that “play nice” with one another so that accessing content from multiple sources and publishers is a unified, continuous experience.

“When we say we put digital content at teachers’ and students’ fingertips, that should be the reality. Now fully compatible with all learning management systems, the digital content delivered through Pearson Realize should make learning and assessing student performance easier, and that’s why we’re committed to interoperability,” said Marc Nelson, vice president of product management at Pearson. “We’re proud to support IMS and the future of digital education, where educators can easily select the digital products that meet their students’ needs without having to worry about whether or not they work together.”…Read More

How safe is my student data?

Ed tech companies are not immune to hackers and vulnerabilities. But schools can protect themselves

data-safetyA few years ago I was attending a meeting at my county office, where a vendor who runs a popular education site was making a presentation. If I’m being honest, I’ll admit I wasn’t paying close attention. It was a product our district was already using, and I was our top level administrator for my district’s domain on the site. Stifling a yawn or two, I started to do what any bored student would do—see if I could break stuff.

Eventually, I happened upon an exploit by chance. I was working both in my district’s instance (the domain and accounts registered for our schools) as well as the one the county office set up for this presentation. Sometimes when I signed out of one, it signed me out of the other as well.

I signed into my district as the top-level admin, and then redirected to the county site by simply changing the URL. In doing so I gained top level privileges to the county’s instance, too, which should have been reserved exclusively for the vendor reps making the presentation. I raised my hand and asked, “Do you know someone can gain higher privileges than they should have?”…Read More

50 tips to develop and run your online courses

From getting started to managing the day-to-day business, try these 50 tips for setting up a successful online course for any grade level

online-learningAs many K-12 U.S. public schools and districts are struggling to compete with 100 percent online cyber charter schools for essential student funding, many universities are struggling to understand the impact of MOOCs on future enrollment. Both of these scenarios point to the one thing that is abundantly clear, online education is having another growth spurt in the second decade of the 21st century and the race to create in-house online content is on.

In-house online content is defined here as online course development created by practicing K-12 educators to avoid having to access sometimes cost-prohibitive, commercially-developed online courses.

However, in addition to the already full plates of educators, in-house online content and course development remains a challenge. With a healthy dose of optimism and motivation to better serve their current, digitally-inclined students’ expectations, along with many excellent, free online tools for online and blended course development, K-16 educators are now able to master the task of online course content for blended learning models and/or 100 percent online course development using the following easily-implemented strategies. While the physical location of the classroom may be left behind, the online classroom adventure has just begun.…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

7 steps to creating PLCs teachers want to use

Practical tips for building PLCs that serve every educator

PLCs-communitiesEd. note: Innovation In Action is a new monthly column from the International Society of Technology in Education focused on exemplary practices in education.

plcs-isteAt my district, the MSD of Wayne Township in Indianapolis, we have found that changing the way we think about teacher training not only benefits staff developers and administrators, but schools, the district as a whole, teachers, and ultimately students. A critical part of our revitalized PD plan has been the use of professional learning communities (PLCs), which are essentially groups of educators that work collaboratively and share ideas, often in an online format.

Benefits of PLCs
One of the first reasons many schools and districts begin thinking about online professional development is to save time and money. As we increase the number of digital opportunities for students, unfortunately the number of professional development staff does not always increase at the same rate. The reality is that we must offer more (and better) professional development with fewer resources.…Read More

How using technology can keep parents in the loop

Smart ways 2 districts are tackling their K-12 parent communication challenges, and how IT can help

parents-technologySix years ago most of Maine Township High School District 207’s parent communication efforts were one-way in nature.

According to Hank Thiele, assistant superintendent of technology and learning, parent newsletters, email blasts, and website announcement were the communication mainstays for the 7,000-student district in Park Ridge, Ill.

But in the past few years, Thiele’s department began to integrate more interactive, technology-based options into the mix—one that would keep parents up-to-date on what their kids were up to, and give them a chance to respond. “We really want to foster two-way communication with our families,” Thiele says.…Read More

12 big education challenges your LMS can solve

An educator shares her biggest challenges and how the right piece of technology can bring a school together

LMS-teachersWith the rapid rise of online technology resources, coupled with the ever-expanding list of the latest teaching strategies, an educator might feel like they are constantly walking through a thick, dark jungle to carve a clear path to harness the power of the hardware, software, and new theories to effectively improve teaching and learning.

But before we can optimize the student’s learning potential we have to face facts. There are a host (well, at least 12) challenges that I’ve identified that educators must first address before classroom models are flexible enough to expand both within and beyond classroom walls, and our solution for helping to solve them.

So my list looks like this:…Read More

Blackboard acquires MyEdu to retool the LMS

Ask students what they remember from their learning management system (LMS) in college, and they’ll likely recall a clunky interface used to register for classes, download course PDFs and request a transcript, edSurge reports. It was somewhere they went by necessity–not by choice. And when they graduated, they were more than happy to leave the LMS behind. Even Jay Bhatt, CEO of Blackboard–a household name in the LMS market–conceded in a conversation with EdSurge that its LMS needed an overhaul…

Read the full story

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Moodlerooms CEO: Blackboard acquisition will expand open-source movement

Blackboard's share of the college LMS market has dropped in recent years.

Lou Pugliese, CEO of Moodlerooms, said Blackboard’s purchase of his company and another firm that hosts and supports the popular open-source learning management system (LMS) Moodle should be welcome news to educators who support the open-source movement over proprietary options because, finally, an open platform has the financial backing of a large company.

Blackboard, by far the largest LMS provider to U.S. colleges and universities, announced March 26 that the company had purchased two providers of the open-source Moodle LMS platform, Moodlerooms and Australia-based NetSpot.

In its entrance into the open LMS world, Blackboard secured the backing of respected open-source advocates like Pugliese and Charles Severance, who has held a number of positions with the Sakai Foundation, another open-source advocacy organization.…Read More

Educators share views on SIS, LMS solutions

Teachers and school leaders sometimes disagreed on how easy it is to use data in the classroom effectively.

State education leaders, district leaders, and teachers disagree on the effectiveness of student information systems (SIS) and learning management systems (LMS) they use to capture data to improve instruction, a new survey reveals.

During a Dec. 13 webinar hosted by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), experts from analyst group Gartner Inc., the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), and CoSN discussed current attitudes toward LMS and SIS software use in schools.

The panelists also discussed how creating online communities of practice can help school district leaders better learn how to integrate data into instruction, and they shared some key advice for teachers and school district leaders.…Read More