*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.

You may be working alongside one of them and not even realize it: a substitute teacher, an adjunct professor, or a special education contractor. They’re all contingent workers - employees hired for a time period of one year or less with a specific end date; they could be full-time or part-time. Over the past decade, a trend has emerged in academia of these contingent workers being hired, and we’ve seen it accelerate at an increasingly high rate over the past few years.

For us here at Identity Automation, we witnessed amazing growth in the education tech sector this year. It’s been quite a ride... from North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction’s roll out of its cloud entity platform to our irrefutable support of the Student Privacy Pledge.

In a previous post, we discussed about understanding how, and if, new educational apps align with your school’s data and student privacy policies. With the overwhelming amount of educational apps currently available and new ones popping up everyday, it can sometimes be difficult to shuffle through them to find those that meet the teacher’s need and also provide the security needed to protect the personal information of the teachers and students using them. With all that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of top ranked educational freemium applications that we came across in the marketplace this year.