Whether you’re a teacher or an IT admin, you’ve probably seen a number of articles and blog posts recapping the best new apps for the classroom released in 2015. Since we speak so often with schools around the country, we’ve heard a lot about all these apps -- good, bad and otherwise. We also realized there’s something far more important to convey to you as you look for potential apps to use in the classroom.

The new school year has begun and so have the challenges that come with managing thousands of student accounts. Recently, we saw an article about one school district in Tennessee that experienced the chaos of manual identity management first hand when they attempted to deploy their iPads for Kids Program.

During every school year, faculty members resign, students graduate and staff are terminated. However, when a student or an employee leaves the school, who makes sure their accounts are deactivated and deleted?

News of a school district grappling with the security pitfalls of access management made headlines recently and it caught our eye. According to ZDNet, when Bearden Middle School in Knoxville, Tennessee issued new iPads to their students as part of the national iPads for Kids Program, they had few options at their disposal for securing them.

First off, what is an Orphan account?

Orphan accounts are the accounts that have somehow slipped past the de-provisioning paper trail.  Those accounts that still have organizational access to systems without a valid owner.  

School’s back in session. With the influx of new students, returning teachers and temporary staff coming back online, requests for account creations, resource partitioning and call support elicit groans across countless IT departments.

Privacy in education is a subject that has received significant attention recently, and we see it garnering even more attention in the future. It affects students, teachers, administrators, parents, IT staff and IT vendors. All involved tread a fine line, balancing the security issues that are vital to the operation of a school with the individual privacy rights of the actual classroom users of technology.

A few years ago, North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) selected Identity Automation to build a cloud identity platform to manage all its users in all its public schools. Each student, teacher, staff member and administrator at every K-12 public school would be using the platform to access all the state provided applications and programs they needed to use on a daily basis.

In case you weren’t able to attend the Identity Automation sponsored, Texas CTO 2015 Summer Clinic in Austin, TX, or if you missed the keynote speaker, Mark Strama, Head of Google Fiber Operations in Austin, TX, we’re here to bring you some highlights and lessons learned!

When the public school system of Minnetonka, Minnesota, came to us to help implement a new Identity Automation Management system, they had very specific needs - and many of them. They had an infrastructure that no longer suited their needs and was technologically unwieldy, so they turned to us to provide an easy-to-manage, secure IAM platform for over 10,000 students in grades K-12 and their educators. We not only met their expectations, but exceeded them.