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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.

California’s Oakland USD Adopts Aeries Communications Powered by ParentSquare to Enhance School-Home Engagement Efforts

Santa Barbara, CA—Nov. 17, 2021—Aeries Communications—the unified school-home communications platform powered by ParentSquare for the Aeries® Student Information System (SIS)—is now providing all-in-one, secure, two-way communications for the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). The platform enables the district to engage all students’ families—regardless of language or socioeconomic barriers—with a single, parent-centric communications platform.

OUSD relies on the Aeries SIS as its central database for student information. With 26 years of experience working with K-12 districts, Aeries SIS allows schools to power everything from daily operations to student portals to communication and fundraising. The district’s adoption of Aeries Communications powered by ParentSquare began when OUSD piloted the platform’s COVID-19 health screening tool at three school sites to quickly and efficiently monitor the daily health status of students and staff. Following the successful pilot program, the district expanded the health monitoring tool to include all its staff and 35,000 students in 80 schools.

Today, OUSD has consolidated and streamlined all of their communication and parent engagement activities under the Aeries Communications powered by ParentSquare platform, which offers all the communication tools that district leaders need, including alerts, website and social media sharing capabilities, newsletters, secure student-specific document delivery, automated attendance notices and more. Communications can be translated into more than 100 languages, and app, email, text, voice, and web portal access help foster more equitable communication across the district.…Read More

How we turned around our scheduling methods

Demographics:

Alpine School District in Utah serves over 82,000 students across 89 schools.

Biggest challenge:

Our student count in any given grade level (9-12) ranges from 450 students to almost 1,200. Therefore, you can imagine the challenges we  faced when we tried to schedule students using traditional methods.

We struggled to balance accommodating students, teachers, and registrars with an equitable process for students to get the classes they wanted and needed for graduation. As a large district, our registrars were juggling teacher schedules, student needs, graduation requirements, and time restraints. Not to mention, students were left without immediate, side-by-side access to graduations requirements and available classes. It was a paper-trail fiasco.…Read More

Beware: Your SIS might not be protecting student data

Obligatory CYA note: This article is presented as an “insider’s look” at how SIS security works and the common pitfalls associated with the “convenience vs. compliance” dilemma. The author is not a lawyer and the piece should not be misconstrued as legal advice.

When FERPA was signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1974, “accessibility” meant “the key to the filing cabinet,” and an “information request” was either an in-person conversation or a bundle of paperwork.

Now, nearly 50 years later, the entire context of the law has changed. Educational records have found a new (digital) home. Efficiency and accessibility are basic expectations, and the amount of red tape required to perform basic duties is shrinking all the time.…Read More

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Fixing the grade passback pain point

Grade passback is a pain point for educators and school systems. Just go online and look up the help desk for popular grading platforms and you’ll notice the cries for help from users:

“Anybody have a solution for passing a midterm and final letter grade to their SIS?”

“Who is having problems with grade passback?”…Read More

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The must-have for a SIS? It’s not what you think!

Earning buy-in from stakeholders is one of the most important factors when moving to a new SIS.

At Mooresville Consolidated School Corporation, where I work as a data management coordinator, our former SIS was unreliable, inaccessible, and had limited functionality. With frustration building among staff, we selected a new SIS that would allow us to become more efficient, engaged, and empowered.

It was at this time that we realized we needed to not only change our procedures for implementing a new solution, but also ensure the buy-in from staff, teachers, students, and parents. Change can be difficult, especially when you’re transitioning to a new SIS, and we wanted to make sure all stakeholders were on board throughout the entire process.…Read More

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Complex Integrations Simplified

Kimono makes it easy to securely share student information, including grades, amongst district software applications. Kimono’s standard-agnostic platform connects the SIS with other applications using the preferred integration method for each one.

Researcher asks: Does the SIS build or dismantle trust?

One researcher is poised to take a fascinating look at Student Information Systems and the data they collect

trust-sisFor all the hand-wringing, media attention, and proposed legislation over data and student privacy the academic research on the topic may just now be starting to catch up. And when it comes to the student data-collection linchpin that is the Student Information System, that research is just about nonexistent.

That’s according to William G. Staples, a sociologist, professor, and director of the Surveillance Studies Research Center at the University of Kansas. Staples has a history of researching both surveillance-related topics and also more standard sociological fare, and is the recent recipient of a small Spencer Foundation grant that will enable him to conduct some research with relevant school and public stakeholders around the SIS and how its data is being used in the interests of students. Staples recently spoke with eSchool News about his upcoming research.

eSchool News: How did you get involved in this line of inquiry? You’ve done some previous research into surveillance? …Read More

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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

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

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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

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