An Application Programming Interface, or API, connects your data from different applications and helps facilitate interoperability between edtech providers and district systems. It’s vital for school districts to understand what an API is and how it works to modernize data infrastructure to create safe ecosystems for student data. This understanding will enable districts to ask the right questions when procuring and implementing edtech software. Learn more about what an API is, how this impacts you and your district, and best practices when utilizing APIs with edtech providers!
In our quest to help networks better understand and improve their K12 school system's capabilities, we created the School Network Pledge. This pledge symbolizes secure access to student data, educates practitioners and families about student privacy, promotes equity, and ensures fiscal responsibility for edtech purchases. By signing this pledge, schools are signaling to other school networks, edtech vendors, and their community that they’re committed to helping students grow with interoperability.
To support edtech vendors in enhancing the use of educational data and improving teaching and learning practices for stronger student outcomes, we created the Edtech Vendor Interoperability Pledge. This pledge symbolizes the commitment to maximizing equitable access and availability through data interoperability. By signing the pledge, edtech vendors are signaling they are committed to enhancing their products' security, access, privacy, and interoperability. This enables educators, and families to be more involved in their student’s education, enhancing the effectiveness of their educational data. It also informs teaching and learning practices for stronger student outcomes.
A successful and modernized Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) should function as a dynamic tool empowering educators, principals, and decision-makers to directly impact student outcomes. Beyond the mere collection of data, the system must seamlessly transform information into actionable insights through intuitive dashboards. This evolution from data to information to knowledge to wisdom is crucial for informed decision-making at various educational levels.
Ready to uncover recommendations, resources, and success stories to enhance your journey to harness the full potential of SLDS (Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems)? Dive into Project Unicorns’s latest resource and learn how to use the strategy of federal funding braiding to secure federal funding sources and improve your implementation.
Stories from the Field, curated by Project Unicorn, provide a glimpse into the collaborative efforts between school systems and edtech solution providers, offering valuable insights into what's possible within an interoperable data ecosystem in education. These stories supplement the findings from the 2023 State of the Sector (SOTS) Report, offering a detailed analysis of K-12 school system capabilities related to education data, with input from 208 unique LEAs, Regional Education Service Agencies, and school systems. Explore Stories from the Field and the SOTS report to better understand the evolving landscape of education data.
The potential of cooperatives to build capacity for implementing Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) is vast. With the ability to foster interagency cooperation and strengthen the data ecosystem, this strategy presents an innovative approach. This resource provides suggestions and examples of incorporating cooperatives into your SLDS initiative. Learn about the key benefits, anticipate challenges, and explore recommendations for state leaders.
Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) can be crucial in education data management and data-driven decision-making. Some states have increasingly looked to make these connections to workforce development, such as California’s Cradle to Career system. These systems are designed to collect, store, analyze, and manage a wide range of data related to student performance, school information, demographics, and other relevant indicators in the education data curriculum. To ensure effective use and meaningful data analysis, interoperability is a key consideration in SLDS implementation.
As we work to provide physical infrastructure for our schools that is safe, healthy, and supportive for all students, the time has come to align resources towards creating a digital infrastructure that is equally safe, accessible, resilient, sustainable, and future-proof.
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Read MoreProgress reports go out on Thursday and the teachers are up in arms because they can’t enter scores into their online gradebook. This isn’t because the internet is down or due to a device malfunction—it’s because the online gradebook isn’t able to share data with the student information system (SIS)...
Marisa Kaplan, EdSurge
Read MoreData should maintain its meaning as it gets passed between schools, districts, and even states. Interoperability standards assist in providing solutions for increasing concerns over linking student, teacher, school, and district data to create actionable outcomes.
Corey Matlack, No.Inc
Read More“The Oklahoma SDE serves 512 traditional school districts, 28 charter school districts, 58 charter school sites, and over 1,795 schools. With over 693,700 students in the state, the OK SDE works hard to meet the challenging needs of students with educational technology.”
Ariana Bauer, CPSI, Ltd.
Read MoreNaturally, robust reporting and analysis features play a key role in data-driven instruction. So when a tool isn’t as user-friendly as it could be, it behooves us to work with companies’ teams to incorporate our teachers’ feedback into product updates.”
Tim Leddy, Senior Product Manager
Read MoreThere’s no secret sauce in terms of platform, reports or software; it’s about creating an interoperable ecosystem, developing the right habits and empowering teachers to accomplish lofty goals.”
Anthony Nevico, Former Senior Director of Systems & Data
Read MoreData interoperability is an imperative for multiple reasons. Regarding the high mobility rate within Providence Public Schools, it allows for students to have immediate access to the curricular tools and resources in their home school at the moment of entry, which ensures that there is no loss in learning time."
Cameron Berube, Director of Curriculum & Instruction
Is Meaning Lost When Data Is Exported? Why Reasoning Mind Takes a 'Wait And See' Approach
Read MoreWhat you need in order for an API to work is for all districts to use the same set of standards to connect to vendors, but that is technically complicated.”
William McGuinness, Director of Product Management
Zeal CEO John Danner: Want to Make Data Actionable? Start With Building the Right Culture
Read MoreThe solution that’s been proposed is to roll up data from all systems and present it in a dashboard. Because the data isn’t well-aligned, it’s a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ problem.”
John Danner, Chief Executive Officer
Data Sharing Hasn’t Been a Concern for Most Newsela Customers—But Super Users Want More
Read MoreWhen we see more adoption, we will work on automating and generalizing the approach. The tipping point will be when it is more efficient for us to build tools that give more control to administrative customers than it is to handle their requests manually”
Dan Cogan-Drew, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder
Illuminate Education Shines Light on Growing Need for Better Data Sharing.
This article is part of the guide What Does It Take to Make Interoperability Work in K-12 Education?
EdSurge
Read More“We’ve been talking about interoperability since the beginning in 2009. It’s a key tenet of what we do... No one uses the word ‘Interoperability, but that’s what they [educators] are asking for.”
Mark Walls, Chief Product Officer
DIY or Buy? How Lexia Learning Is Revisiting Data Integration
EdSurge
Read MoreWe are making progress constantly but the question is really, ‘Do users feel like we’re making enough progress fast enough?’”
Rob Paushter, Vice President of Product Development
