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

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

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

Nine templates to help educators leverage school data

Educators need a practical system that organizes school data in a way that is easily understood.

Educators and administrators are collecting an enormous amount of data about the progress of their students and schools. Now that this information has been collected, how can it be used to improve education?

What administrators and teachers need is a practical system that organizes school and student data in a way that is easily understood and readily available during the school day, according to a collaboration by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and Gartner Inc.…Read More

Purdue’s student achievement technology goes national

Course Signals is an educational technology tool that can help improve student achievement and lead to better student retention.
Course Signals is an educational technology tool that can help improve student achievement and lead to better student retention.

A Purdue University-piloted tool that uses educational technology—and online “signals”—to warn some students that their grades are dropping, offer study-habit suggestions, and provide positive reinforcement to students who are acing quizzes and exams is being released nationally.

“Course Signals” is being made available to higher-education institutions through a joint effort by SunGard Higher Education and Purdue University to help increase student achievement. Course Signals was developed at the university and piloted for three semesters before its 2009 launch. (See “Tech helps students adopt good study habits.”)…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.…Read More