TALENT DEVELOPMENT
Businesswire | April 06, 2023
Apogee, the trusted strategic managed technology services partner to higher education, is pleased to announce the expansion of its Executive Advisory Services to meet the evolving needs of higher education clients. Apogee Executive Advisory Services embeds former campus leaders within college and university cabinet-level teams to lead the assessment, modernization, and transformation of campus IT services.
Apogee’s recognized team of experts can serve as full-time or fractional leaders for long-term engagements or during high demand periods due to vacant or nascent IT leadership. Led by higher education and technology veteran David Hinson, Apogee executive advisors are seasoned chief technology officers (CTO), chief information officers (CIO), chief information security officers (CISO), and chief operation officers (COO) or vice presidents of administration who have years of cabinet-level experience at colleges and state systems.
Fifteen disciplines now round out the offering, including IT infrastructure, networking, cybersecurity, and compliance assessments and strategies. Advisory services are provided over weeks of remote and on-premises observations. Every engagement is tailored for the institution, and insights are codified into actionable strategic and tactical technology plans for campus leadership.
“I am excited about our enhanced advisory services practice, the world-class experts on our team, and the opportunities ahead to meet colleges and universities where they are as they navigate the post-pandemic world and confront the looming enrollment cliff,” said Hinson. “Whether an institution is facing vacant IT leadership, new IT leadership trying to quickly get its arms around pressing issues and priorities, or mature leadership looking to take campus technology service delivery to the next level, we craft engagements that enable clients to understand the current state of IT, remediate urgent issues, measure meaningful progress on long-term projects, and inculcate best practices for effective and strategic technology management.”
Situated in Winston-Salem, N.C., Salem Academy and College traces its history to 1772 and is the oldest educational institution for girls and women in America. Today, the institution is an intimate learning community of 1,100 women from all over the world and is one of the country's most distinguished private liberal arts colleges.
“Like many small colleges in the U.S., Salem Academy and College experienced shortages and gaps in IT leadership, staff, and expertise coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dr. Summer McGee, Salem Academy and College president. “David Hinson assessed our IT organization, infrastructure, and abilities and put us on a path to not only get back to business as usual, but also to set up a roadmap for us to align our technology investments to our institutional mission. Our engagement with Apogee has helped ensure that we are better prepared technologically to deliver on our promise to develop the full potential of our students and prepare them to change the world.”
With nearly a quarter century of experience exclusively in managed technology services to higher education, Apogee has built the expertise to deliver advisory services in the following disciplines:
• Strategic Planning and Documentation
• Business and Information Technology Resilience Planning
• Cybersecurity Controls and Audit
• Cybersecurity Program Management and Operations
• Vendor Management
• Financial Capacities Discovery
• Staffing and Organization Sizing Needs Analysis
• Coaching and Professional Development Pathways
• Governance, Compliance, and Internal Policy Development, including compliance with federal, state, and contractual cybersecurity obligations such a Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), as well as privacy policies and compliance such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), and Consumer Data Protection Regulation (CDPR)
• Infrastructure Analysis and Planning
• Technology and Cybersecurity Risk Assessment and Management
• Budget Analysis and Preparation
• Leadership Succession Planning
• Cabinet Leadership Strategies and Methodologies
• Formal Technology Plan and Accreditation Support
About Apogee
Established in Austin in 1999, Apogee is a leading provider of managed technology services that enable colleges and universities to innovate to enrich the campus experience and foster student vitality. Uniquely positioned to serve higher education, Apogee supports a community of more than 1 million students and administrators at nearly 400 colleges and universities nationwide. The company’s comprehensive portfolio includes Managed Campus (networks and managed IT and cloud services), ResNet (residential networks), campus engagement and digital signage, and video services.
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TALENT DEVELOPMENT
Businesswire | March 28, 2023
PowerSchool the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America, today announced it is in later stage development of localization features for customers to use in their regions developed under PowerSchool’s proprietary international framework. The upcoming release enables out of box support for right-to-left language support and Arabic translation capabilities in three of its Unified Operations solutions, including Unified Operations PowerSchool SIS, Unified Operations PowerSchool Enrollment Express, and Unified Operations PowerSchool Ecollect Forms, as well as its learning management system (LMS), PowerSchool Unified Classroom® Schoology Learning.
“This international framework is critical for delivering our world-class solutions to our extensive and growing international customer base,” said Tony Kender, Chief Revenue Officer at PowerSchool. “PowerSchool will continue to prioritize providing our global customers with the tools they need to support their students and improve learning outcomes.”
This framework supports localization of a user’s experience (such as right-to-left language support) to empower international educational institutions to deliver tailored instruction to the more than 50 million students in more than 90 countries PowerSchool serves. Additional toolkits will be made available to support localization for other regions and languages for the growing number of students, educators, and families using PowerSchool solutions to achieve their desired learning outcomes worldwide.
In the near term, the right-to-left and Arabic language translation toolkit will empower more educators around the world with timesaving, centralized access to the tools they need to deliver tailored instruction, elevate data utilization, and foster family engagement.
“As PowerSchool expands globally, including across the UAE, it is important for us to offer right-to-left language support and Arabic translation capabilities,” said Robert Speed, Vice President International Sales at PowerSchool. “With more than 313 million people speaking Arabic around the world, these language supports ensure more educators, students, and families can benefit from the digital transformation of education.”
The new language support provides users with multiple benefits including:
• Helping educators, students, and families who read right-to-left interact and learn in a more familiar and accessible way.
• Providing the opportunity for students to develop collaboration skills in their primary language.
• Eliminating manual translation tasks for both educators and students, which can interfere with the learning process.
• Ensuring educational institutions support equity and access to a larger proportion of their students and families.
PowerSchool customers can also utilize the self-service Language Toolkit feature within PowerSchool SIS, Enrollment Express, and Ecollect Forms to load additional Arabic translations as well as other languages that can be leveraged by any partners across the globe to localize to their regional needs. For Schoology Learning users, PowerSchool directly provides right-to-left language support and Arabic translation capabilities.
The right-to-left language support and Arabic translation capabilities will be fully available to PowerSchool customers in late 2023.
About PowerSchool
PowerSchool 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 50 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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CONTINUING EDUCATION
PRnewswire | May 30, 2023
LINQ, the leading K-12 education business solutions provider, today announced the launch of LINQ Connect, a K-12 education SaaS platform to improve parent-to-school transactions. LINQ Connect is the latest iteration of the widely used TITAN Family Portal platform, adopted by more than 1,500 school districts,16,000 schools, and over 1.2 million parents and guardians across the U.S.
LINQ Connect provides parents and schools with a modernized payment system that eliminates the need to send cash for school lunches, class field trips or additional course materials. The automated payment platform provides a secure method for financial transactions to ensure successful and accurate payments, reduces risks associated with cash transactions and relies less on school finance staff to make daily cash-on-hand deposits.
"Districts are feeling the negative effects of staffing shortages, budget restrictions and school meal debt, so they need a system to easily manage communication and financial transactions with parents and guardians," said Bryan Jones, CEO of LINQ. "LINQ Connect offers a solution that simplifies the management of information and financial transactions throughout the school year for our district partners, easing daily interactions for busy parents and students, and helping schools strengthen their relationships with the communities they serve."
As schools face unprecedented levels of unpaid meal debt, LINQ Connect allows schools to send notifications about low balances or debt to parents and guardians in a discreet and direct manner. Moreover, the platform enables parents and guardians to input food allergy information, review nutritional information for school meals and place spending restrictions on accounts to ensure funds last the intended period of time. The platform can be translated in Armenian, Burmese, Chinese, French, Korean, Spanish, Russian and Vietnamese to ensure all parents and guardians have access to their children's nutrition and play an active role in their educational experience.
"LINQ Connect was designed to ease the burden on parents and school district office staff through easy-to-use technologies that guarantee the information is readily available and accessible for parents and caregivers," said Brandy Keller, Senior Vice President at LINQ. "Now, they can digitally access their children's meal accounts, apply for free or reduced meals, and monitor their nutrition through a single payment system that is secure and convenient and provides parents and caregivers the opportunity to share information with their schools."
Schools that currently use the platform will have access to a library of resources to support communication and engagement with parents and guardians, as well as district toolkits, offered in Spanish and English, to support the adoption of the enhanced platform for new and existing users. For parents, using the new platform is as simple as downloading a new application; their past balances will transfer seamlessly.
About LINQ
LINQ brings a new level of digital transformation and operation efficiency to K-12 leaders across districts and states. Built by a team of K-12 experts, our solutions include Nutrition for districts and states, Education Resource Planning (ERP), Forms & Workflows for districts and Payment portals for Parents and Guardians. Through our first-of-its kind K-12 Business Platform, LINQ is committed to Empowering the Business of K-12.
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