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. 

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.

Peek inside any K-12 classroom and you may find students taking a test on a desktop computer or a teacher connecting with a satellite school via video conferencing. Technology has transformed the regular classrooms of today to the learning centers of tomorrow.

Digital tools are as critical to student learning today as pen and paper ​have been in the past. We at Identity Automation support the addition of the Enhancing Education Through Technology ​bill ​to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act​ (ESEA)​.​ This bill would ensure a dedicated and well-funded tech program would be part of the revised ESEA.​ The​ effort ​to make this revision ​is currently led by Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and is up for a vote later this afternoon. 

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.

Next week, I will be taking part in the CoSN Annual Conference from March 16-19 in Atlanta. CoSN, or Consortium for School Networking, is the leading association for school district technology leaders. I’ve attended this conference before; however, this year’s theme of ‘Enabling Your Digital Leap’ is quite intriguing.