So my original goal was going to be to update everyone on the results of our integration work we did over the summer. This is a fun blog to write because I feel the success of this accomplishment is beyond expectations for everyone. Our original goal was to design a solution that made account creation, logging in, rostering, and account maintenance less task intensive. Using the SIS as the point of entry our goal was to automate all the integration between systems in a secure reliable way. We also had a strong focus on protecting the identity of the teachers and students so encryption was also important.

The environment I will reference here is a district up north that uses Windows, Mac, Chromebooks, and iPads. Teacherease is the SIS but this solution will work with most SIS software no problem.

When completed our solution added the following automated features.

• Student and staff accounts created in Google
• Student and staff accounts are created in AD
• Groups are automatically created in Google and AD
• Login ID and password is securely synced to all school systems
• SSO for students and teachers for every system that requires a login
• Students and staff are automatically assigned to designated groups
• Rosters are created in all systems that need rostering including LMS
• Cloud portal for managing passwords
• New staff or students during the year are automatically added after being entered in SIS
• Departing staff or students are automatically disabled in all systems
• Graduation reassigns grad year specific groups
• Students leaving school automatically get link to download all work from Google drive
• Students are rostered in next years classes
• Any changes in data are synchronized to all systems within a few hours

The results were amazing. Reported student and teacher login issues dropped over 85%. The lack of issues in day to day classroom activity is saving between 15-30 mins per day in every classroom.  We are very curious how much time the rostering element of the solution will save teachers and curriculum leaders as all the students graduate. A good deal of the data as part of this project had to still be set up like normal being the first time this was done. next year the work around rostering should decrease dramatically as well.

Let’s put some quick numbers to this that really made me a believer. These stats are based on 400 students so keep that in mind. The systems reporting can keep track of how many events a student or teacher would have to manually login or update roster info etc. These numbers are a total of how many times automation has replaced what used to be a manual step.  I am writing this blog just before xmas and these stats are current from the beginning of this year. Ready for this? 31,649 automated events. 1397 for teachers and 30,187 for students. For rostering they had 3,319 enrollments and 130 courses synced to almost a dozen systems. The top app was launched and logged into automatically over 12,000 times!

As everyone can hopefully see the soft cost savings from this project are tremendous. We feel this is the perfect project to highlight how innovative proactive technology solutions can make an impact in today’s schools.

Seeing how well this worked definitely made it worth the efforts involved in getting to this point. The solution is made up of a few third party vendor products and integration work done by our team. We have now successfully deployed this solution into the Google cloud making it possible to deploy quickly and more cost effective for future schools we work with. We are also working on a new solution for pulling student data together into a single easy to manage interface as an additional feature of this system.

If you would like to get more info and see if this may fit your district please let us know.