Information Technology

Information, news and features for the education sector IT professionals


An Administrator's Guide to Optimizing School Business Processes Using the Cloud

An expert viewpoint piece lays out the benefits of using the cloud to manage school processes and office business, and a roadmap to optimizing school business processes for K–12 school administrators.

ParentSquare Releases Back-To-School Guide for Better School-Home Communications

As K–12 educators and school leaders prepare for the start of the 2022–23 school year, unified communications provider ParentSquare has released a Back-to-School Checklist for Successful School-Home Communications, a free guide to help administrators and district communication leaders to revisit and improve their parent-home communications, according to a news release.

Four Ways Schools Benefit from Revamping Payments through Digitization

Schools are far too bogged down in slow, inefficient processes for collecting payments from families for a multitude of student activities and needs, and these processes are ripe for true digitization — an expert in e-commerce payments explains four main benefits for schools of a payments revamp through digitization.

K12 SIX Releases Essential Cyber Incident Response Template for Schools

K12 Security Information Exchange today released a free Cyber Incident Response Runbook for U.S. public schools, a fill-in-the-blank style guide created specifically to help K–12 school leaders build an effective, comprehensive response plan for any type of cyber incident.

Why Student Data Breaches Are Dangerous & How They May Alter the Ed Tech Marketplace

What do the expanding impact of recent ed tech data breaches — and what the growing dangers of student data breaches — mean for policymakers, parents, IT professionals, and school districts? THE Journal Insider podcast discusses student data privacy, policy, and ed tech procurement with Doug Levin, national director of K12 Security Information Exchange, and Dr. Tim Clark, Vice President of K12 Programs at 1EdTech.

ParentSquare Joins Access 4 Learning Student Data Privacy Consortium

Amid a growing call by cybersecurity experts and privacy advocates for tighter student data protection measures, and two big data breaches in recent months compromising the personal information of millions of students, unified school-home engagement provider ParentSquare has joined the nonprofit Access for Learning Community’s Student Data Privacy Consortium, the company said this week.

Two More Districts, in California & Washington, Add 22K to Number of Students Impacted by Illuminate Breach

Two more school districts, Waterford USD in California and Renton in Washington state, have filed state-mandated notification letters with their respective state Attorney Generals revealing that their students — a combined total of at least 22,000 — were among the millions across the country impacted by the Illuminate Education breach of private student data.

These DisplayNote Solutions Enable Wireless Screencasting on Any Connected Devices: Ed Tech Chat from ISTE Live 2022

In this June 28 video interview from ISTE Live 2022 in New Orleans, Ed Morgan illustrates how DisplayNote's Montage software solution helps K–12 teachers who want to wirelessly share any device's screen to the main display in a classroom and how the Broadcast solution lets a teacher screencast to up to 40 students in real-time.

How the PowerSchool Dashboards Work in Unified Insights, Unified Curriculum & Instruction: Ed Tech Chat from ISTE Live 2022

From #ISTELive22, Sam Sale showed THE Journal readers how the educator dashboard of two PowerSchool K–12 software solutions bring together multiple sources of data to simplify real-time interventions and lesson decision-making for teachers and administrators: Unified Insights with MTSS and Unified Classroom Curriculum and Instruction.

When Schools Use Online STEM Programs, Everyone Wins

A technology teacher from New York explains how the online STEM instruction platform CoderZ is an accessible method of teaching coding and helps him introduce students to some of the realities of working in IT and prepares his students for success in the workplace.

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