CONTINUING EDUCATION
PowerSchool | September 01, 2022
PowerSchool the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America, has released its key findings from the Education Focus Report for the 2022-2023 school year. The report represents the findings from a national survey of more than 3,500 educators, in-depth conversations with over 75 education practitioners and leaders, and a comprehensive scan of over 25 mid-to-large U.S. school districts’ strategic plans.
“We are excited about the valuable insights this report will bring to educators and district leaders, “Our goal is to recenter PK-12 conversations starting with what’s most important to school districts their priorities to better support students.”
Ryan Imbriale, former district leader, and Vice President of Education Solutions at PowerSchool.
The report found seven common strategic priorities across U.S. districts: high-quality, tiered instruction; whole-child supports; exceptional workforce; robust family engagement; expanded early childhood learning; graduates prepared for life, college, and career; and organizational excellence and efficiency. The report also highlights two grounding concepts: data-informed decision-making and equitable student supports. These common district priorities reflect schooling both before and during the continuing pandemic. In the report, educators reveal that technology led to an increase in student engagement, strengthened family involvement, and prioritized modern professional learning needs. Key findings include the emergence of whole-child support as tantamount to students’ academic success. “We have to account for our students’ mental, social, and emotional health needs before we can think about learning,” said Chris Cromwell, Instructional Technology Coordinator for West Chester Area School District in Pennsylvania. “Not long ago, when working with teachers, I felt I was driving down the road in my academic lane, and then there was an SEL lane, and those were two separate lanes headed down the highway. But they’re actually not—SEL and academic learning are on the same path and intertwined.” Additionally, as the education industry continues to navigate digital transformation, school leaders are finding technology solutions beneficial to achieving organizational excellence and efficiency. This includes designing data systems, protecting student information, ensuring budget transparency, and achieving a modern technology infrastructure, which have shifted from the back of the office to front and center. This speaks to the power of data and the necessity of equitable resource allocation in meeting student needs.
About PowerSchool
PowerSchool (NYSE: PWSC) is the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America. Its mission is to power the education ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students realize their full potential, in their way. PowerSchool connects students, teachers, administrators, and parents, with the shared goal of improving student outcomes. From the office to the classroom to the home, it helps schools and districts efficiently manage state reporting and related compliance, special education, finance, human resources, talent, registration, attendance, funding, learning, instruction, grading, assessments and analytics in one unified platform. PowerSchool supports over 45 million students globally and more than 15,000 customers, including over 90 of the top 100 districts by student enrollment in the United States, and sells solutions in over 90 countries.
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EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY, ONLINE EDUCATION
Instructure | September 22, 2022
Instructure, the maker of Elevate Data Sync, has entered into an agreement with their partner, Google, that bridges the integration gap for Google Classroom users with a robust and comprehensive solution. With the integration, educational institutions can now keep course data and rosters synchronized between their student information systems (SIS or MIS) and Google Classroom. This means that educators no longer must set up their courses manually or have students use a join code. Teachers can now simply click "accept" when their course is automatically created.Instructure, the maker of Elevate Data Sync, has entered into an agreement with their partner, Google, that bridges the integration gap for Google Classroom users with a robust and comprehensive solution. With the integration, educational institutions can now keep course data and rosters synchronized between their student information systems (SIS or MIS) and Google Classroom. This means that educators no longer must set up their courses manually or have students use a join code. Teachers can now simply click "accept" when their course is automatically created. Elevate Data Sync, Instructure's standards-based interoperability solution that enables secure sharing of student, staff and learning data, will create classes with all the right students ahead of the first day of school and keep them updated if a student changes classes. This automated and adaptable integration can hopefully save teachers, students and the professionals who support them significant amounts of time. Through our partnership with Elevate Data Sync by Instructure, we have added the ability to sync the rosters from your student information system to Classroom, so classes can be automatically created and updated, launching in 15 countries," said Alisa Sommer, head of edtech partnerships at Google. "Education data integration is a complex problem, so we wanted an enterprise-class partner with deep expertise and a cloud-based platform that supports multiple standards and integration methods.
"This partnership with Google Classroom is an ideal example of how Instructure's Learning Platform empowers partners and institutions to innovate and integrate faster,We're proud to be able to work with Google to find a solution that makes the job of educators easier while maintaining the highest level of privacy and security for student data."
Kevin Turco, vice president of product management at Instructure
Schools with Google Workspace for Education Plus that are interested in trying out the integration can sign up for the beta and can find onboarding help on Instructure's Community page. Schools can request more information about Google Workspace for Education Plus if they don't have a subscription already. Once signed up for the beta, admins will be able to integrate class lists and timetables (rosters) directly with most major student information systems or can opt to connect using OneRoster or CSV files. The solution is available and localized in Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
ABOUT INSTRUCTURE
Instructure ( NYSE: INST) is an education technology company dedicated to elevating student success, amplifying the power of teaching, and inspiring everyone to learn together. Today the Instructure Learning Platform supports tens of millions of educators and learners around the world.
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ONLINE EDUCATION
Intellum | July 29, 2022
Intellum, the leader in EdTech for Business, today announced Community, the third component in the Intellum social learning suite and the first in-platform community experience built specifically for corporate education initiatives.
Intellum offers all of the features and functionality associated with an LMS and an LXP and is the only education solution to include content authoring, live event management, and social learning in a single platform. The introduction of Community rounds out Intellum's social learning suite, which also includes group activity streams and both one-to-one and group chat to help organizations engage and educate users through social learning.
Social learning research shows that employees learn largely through observing and imitating the behavior modeled by experienced and successful co-workers and peers. Intellum's new Community offering provides learners with a dedicated space to search for answers, identify experts, and demonstrate their own expertise by asking and responding to questions and voting on the answers associated with concepts and topics of interest.
This empowers learners to do two distinct things: quickly and easily find "just-in-time" answers to pressing questions and author "user-generated content" that is meaningful and increases the learner's visibility among her/his peers.
Because Community lives within the Intellum Platform as part of the broader social experience, administrators can easily embed communities directly into learning initiatives, encouraging users to present questions to a specific group of peers while consuming the curriculum. This presents a compelling reason for learners to stay engaged and to come back to the learning environment more frequently.
"We have been helping clients drive significant learner engagement for years by allowing users to comment on learning content and support each other through cohort-focused activity streams and group chat experiences. But over time we recognized that something was missing. "Social experiences can be fleeting. Clients need to capture their learners' questions and answers in a way that provides long-term value to the education initiative, so we decided to build our own Q&A community into the platform. By integrating formalized curriculum, informal learning, live events and social learning, we make the whole much more valuable than the pieces."
Chip Ramsey, CEO of Intellum
Intellum has a rich history of facilitating social learning. In 2009, the company created Tribe Social (now known as Intellum Social), the first social collaboration tool purpose-built for education. Intellum Social has evolved to include three core social learning components:
Groups are modern vertical activity streams that encourage learners to share links, videos, images, files, and polls to kickstart conversation, collaboration, and engagement with educational content.
Chat allows users to engage in 1:1 or group chats and can be embedded into any experience on the platform, including live events like instructor-led training and Webinars to drive real-time user engagement.
Community gives learners a dedicated space to search for answers, identify experts, and demonstrate their own expertise by asking and responding to questions and voting on the answers associated with concepts and topics they are interested in.
When utilized together, the three components in the Intellum Social suite provide organizations with everything needed to introduce, improve and capitalize on the science of social learning.
About Intellum
Intellum provides the #1 customer, partner, and employee education platform that large brands and fast-moving companies rely on to engage audiences and improve product knowledge, utilization, retention, and revenue. Intellum's scientific, data-driven approach is based on 20+ years of industry experience and the Intellum Platform includes all of the tools an organization needs to create, deploy, manage, track, and continuously improve highly personalized, engaging educational experiences.
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