Earlier this week, we released the most popular blog posts in 2016 from our Enterprise Blog. So today, we wanted to do the same with our K12 and higher education blog posts. After all, we’ve covered a variety of identity and access management (IAM) topics this year on our Education blog, including unique IAM challenges in higher ed, managing contingent users, provisioning users with multiple roles, and student data rostering.

This week, I’m heading to Sacramento, California for the 2016 CETPA Annual Conference. Held by the California Educational Technology Professionals Association (CETPA), the conference is attended by IT professionals from K-12 school districts throughout the state.

*Disclaimer: This article originally appeared in eSchool News. 

Student data privacy is quite a different topic from the headlines most people read concerning data breaches. It is not about malicious intruders hacking or stealing credentials to get into a system to steal corporate intellectual property or records to sell on the dark web. Student data privacy concerns, specifically, center on the misuse of personally identifiable information, known by its acronym PII.

When Dustin Hardin became the Director of Technology for New Caney Independent School District in 2011, the district didn't have WiFi or student accounts and only had basic email for staff. However, district leadership had ambitious goals: to implement 21st century teaching methodologies in the form of digitized learning and ongoing student-teacher engagement. To get there, New Caney ISD created a program called 1:Vision, with the goal of issuing a laptop to each student in grades 3-12.

As you may have heard, we recently announced that we have become an Affiliate Member of the IMS Global Learning Consortium. 

The OneRoster standard is a subset of the Learning Information Services standard that focuses on the school’s needs to exchange roster information and grades. 

At the end of June, I joined more than 16,000 ed tech leaders as they converged on Denver, Colorado for a week of idea sharing, collaboration, and networking at the 2016 ISTE Conference & Expo. 

Looking for the Clayton County Public Schools User Login Page?

Located in the Atlanta suburb of Jonesboro, Georgia, Clayton County Public Schools (CCPS) is future-forward district with a vision of making the digital classroom a reality for its more than 55,000 students, staff, and administrators. As part of this, CCPS is aggressively working towards district-wide adoption of cloud-based education technology.

However, the district quickly realized that the process would be more complicated and time-consuming then initially anticipated. It took months to extract data from the district’s student information system and load it into multiple textbook systems one student at a time.

Long Beach Unified School District is one of the forty largest school districts in the country with 94 campuses and more than 90,000 users comprised of students, teachers, faculty, and administrators.