Identity Automation will be hosting a webinar with Carahsoft to examine the trends in identity management technology that will be impacting the K-12 space over the next 1-2 years. We’ll be discussing the challenges and opportunities of security management tools and educational technologies and how they can be used to advance student education and privacy.

I recently spoke with the IT director of a school district, and he shared with me some concerns school administrators had about our password management solution and whether it could actually make them less secure. I am rarely at a loss for words in my line of work, but in this instance, I was close.

As educators around the country look toward mobile and internet applications to enhance student learning, new privacy concerns are beginning to surface. These student information security woes are often beyond the reach of the IT administrators, and instead put into the hands of teachers who may unintentionally cause sensitive data to be released with as little as a simple app sign-up. Unlike many of the historic applications used by school systems in the past, today’s apps circumvent federal privacy regulations by providing educational tools to teachers from third-party platforms that are often notvetted by IT administrators in advance.

We are headed to Austin, Texas next week for the 2015 Texas CTO Clinic, covering the key issues facing ed tech leaders in Texas and beyond. 

The Minnesota school system is defying expectations with their innovative approach to technology. As a K-12 institution driving the achievement of over 8,500 students, Minnetonka Public Schools approached us looking for a better solution to solve the confusion that their previous single sign-on platform had created.

Student privacy is an extremely delicate topic, important to parents, teachers, administrators, researchers, and students themselves. When we explored the history of student privacy legislation last week, we found a great deal of tension between the legal definition of student privacy and public perceptions of what privacy should be.

In February, we announced that we joined over 100 organizations, including Apple, Google, the Khan Academy and Microsoft in supporting the Student Privacy Pledge. Then in March, at both the Brainstorm 16.0 Conference and CoSN Annual Conference, student privacy surfaced as a leading topic of discussion.

 As I was preparing for tomorrow’s CoSN 2015 New York CTO Clinic on Long Island, I came across somearticles from the other side of the country, in Colorado, debating topics like protecting student data, protecting student privacy, and bolstering FERPA.

I’ve attended the CoSN Annual Conference for the past seven years and in each of those years, I’ve run into more and more people who are customers of Identity Automation. It’s been an interesting transition going from being a vendor no one’s heard of who’s providing a solution to a challenge schools don’t know much about to becoming a leader in a space that’s absolutely pivotal to education technology. It’s also been very satisfying to see the company mature and grow over these past seven years.

Last week our team attended the first “Building Bridges” Washington State Higher Education Technology Conference. The event brought together a diverse group of post-secondary education professionals focused on how technology can be used to maximize student success on campus and as they go into the workforce. Education IT staff, eLearning staff, library staff, institutional research staff, and campus faculty leadership were all in attendance. This broad representation of disciplines was fitting since the conference’s theme was “Building an environment of collaboration across boundaries”.