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.

Why a flexible SIS is a key to mobile learning success

Without a well-rounded student information system (SIS), Center Grove would need multiple software programs to manage its Mobile Minds initiative

flexible-SISExpectations for today’s school districts are higher than ever. Despite increasingly tight budgets and fewer resources, districts are required to operate efficiently and ensure streamlined communications.

The Center Grove Community School Corporation understood these challenges firsthand with the implementation of a one-to-one mobile learning program throughout the high school. When executing a successful one-to-one rollout, you cannot overlook the details.

Nowhere was that more true than on July 30, the second day of school this year. The Center Grove Technology Department deployed 2,200 iPads with a staff of 20, all before lunch. In fact, most students at Center Grove High School missed fewer than 15 minutes of instructional time collecting their iPads.…Read More

Filemaker Pro + Filemaker Go – The ultimate SIS (and much more)?

Why would you possibly develop your own student information system, special education management system, library information system, school financial system, or other data collection and reporting tools? Asks Christopher Dawson for ZDNet. There are so many turnkey solutions on the market, from free and open source to expensive and proprietary, it hardly seems necessary, right? A long, long time ago, I made my living programming Microsoft Access front ends for clinical trial data collection tools. Access was (and still is) quite powerful, but getting it hooked into the web, especially with built-in tools, wasn’t exactly an elegant process. I’ve built more than a few rocking Access applications through the years, but most of that went by the wayside as the world moved away from client-server applications and towards web-based LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL, PHP) solutions to data collection and reporting. So when the folks at Filemaker contacted me and suggested I check out some of the educational applications of the Filemaker ecosystem, I was a bit skeptical…

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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

Mac-based districts could face SIS quandary

Pearson PowerSchool will cease to be compatible with Mac-only database servers at the end of 2010.
Pearson PowerSchool will cease to be compatible with Mac-only database servers at the end of 2010.

Education industry giant Pearson says its PowerSchool student information system (SIS) software will cease to support Macintosh database servers by Dec. 31, forcing Mac-using districts to make some tough decisions.

The announcement came as a surprise to many people, especially because PowerSchool was an Apple product before Pearson bought it from Apple in 2006. Apple earlier had acquired PowerSchool, a leading SIS product for Mac-based schools, from its eponymous owner in 2001.

PowerSchool runs on an Oracle database. While Oracle issued a Windows update some time ago, Mac users are still waiting on the Oracle 11g update that would let them run PowerSchool.…Read More