At a recent Edsby customer conference in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, educators shared tips on how three aspects of Edsby are making a positive impact on student achievement

School districts in Saskatchewan, where 80% of the province’s students are managed on Edsby, have found value using Edsby to find and safely share information across various internal roles for student success.

Here’s what they told each other at a recent Edsby customer conference about three areas of the product that help them do this.

1. Panorama and observations

The Edsby Panorama view is a single page view of everything having to do with a specific child’s education. It also gives educators a way to record and share private observations on a student. All of a student’s current teachers are presented with these observations automatically.

“We use the Edsby Panorama and observations to track which administrators are working with which students and which counselors, and everyone stays updated,” said Hiedi Bodnarchuk, Vice Principal at Bishop James Mahoney in the Greater Saskatoon Catholic School Division in Saskatchewan.

“For example, if I support a student in a class, or with a social issue, I would record ‘met with student,’ and add details and message pertinent teachers if necessary, right within this confidential area of Edsby. Teachers who support those students will also record if they called home or such. I can go review these observations and see who’s been working with that student and doing what. It’s all in one spot.”

2. Monitor groups

Edsby monitor groups can allow the confidential management of students to achieve specific results.

“We’re using monitor groups to track different groups of students to support our Following Their Voices work here in Saskatchewan, and manage FNMI (First Nations, Métis and Inuit) students for whom special funding is available,” said Patricia Bibby, High School Learning Consultant on the Inclusive Learning Team at Saskatchewan Rivers Public School Division.

“Whether it’s a mentor accessing that group, guidance personnel, a teacher assigned to that group, or an administrator, monitor groups are great. Students don’t even know that they’re there; they can’t see the group. The conversations had within that group are private, and all stakeholders have access to important metrics, such as academic achievement (incl. formative learning evidence as well as summative records), attendance data, current expected location based on schedule and more.”

Graydon King, Educational Technology Consultant at Lloydminster Public School Division, also saw benefit in using monitor groups to identify and manage students with at risk attendance or academic scores. But his district found even more value in another aspect of Edsby.

“We added Edsby Analytics to put me out of the job I was doing helping at-risk kids,” he said.

3. Edsby Analytics

Edsby’s optional Analytics system gives educators ways to find patterns and outliers in data captured within Edsby or elsewhere.

“The analytics piece really caught my eye. I was part of a pilot of another system that we just couldn’t get to work. With Edsby, we like that we can filter and determine say, how grade nine female First Nations students that are left handed are doing compared to others, for instance. You’ve got the demographic information there. You can drill in. And it’s expandable,” said King.

King found the analytics information even more meaningful than the risk factors such as attendance and grades available in Edsby’s standard Zoom reports.

The educators made their comments in a session at Edsbyfest Saskatoon in May, 2023 titled “Student Success Framework,” a group exploration of how Edsby is making a positive impact on system wide improvement in each district and how information is shared across various roles for student success.

Researchers warn a lot of edtech doesn’t measure up

For years, educational technology apps had been widely assumed to be beneficial. But there’s been a recent flurry of research suggesting not all are doing their job… with many edtech systems characterized in recent months as unsafe, some even exploitative. So how do the most well known learning management systems (LMSes) in K-12, including the popular Edsby social learning platform for K-12, stack up?

Data privacy and efficacy

A new report from LearnPlatform, just published as of this writing, asserts that only 25% of the most popular edtech products are effective—i.e. deliver clear, quantifiable value—and interoperable. Abstracting the report, an article from District Administration wrote:

Only 19% of edtech apps received a “pass rating” from Common Sense, an organization that seeks to make such technology safer and more equitable, while 42% received a “warning rating.”

How are the most popular learning management systems in K-12 rated by Common Sense? Here are the org’s current ratings as of this writing. Higher is better:

Platform	Common Sense Link & Rating	Common Sense assessment
Edsby	93%	Pass
Canvas	71%	Warning
BrightSpace	80%	Warning
Schoology	50%	Warning
Moodle	43%	Warning
Seesaw	84%	Pass

Interoperability

The same District Administration article above writes most edtech isn’t interoperable, according to the same report’s data.

Using five indicators of interoperability from two trusted organizations, the report suggests most apps miss the mark in this area.

1EdTech standards:
…
8% are Common Cartridge certified.
8% are LTI Advantage certified.

Project Unicorn standards:

27% have signed the Project Unicorn Interoperability pledge.
Only 5% have earned Project Unicorn’s Interoperability Certification.

How do popular K-12 learning management systems rate on these interoperability criteria? Here’s how each currently stands up:

Platform	Common Cartridge certification	LTI certification	Project Unicorn signatory	Project Unicorn certification
Edsby	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Canvas	Yes	Yes	No	No
BrightSpace	Yes	Yes	No	No
Schoology	No	Yes	Yes	No
Moodle	No	Yes	No	No
Seesaw	No	No	Yes	No

Marketing student data to advertisers

In May, 2022, Human Rights Watch published a study asserting that many edtech companies exploit children’s data for advertising revenue.

Of the 163 EdTech products reviewed, 145 (89 percent) appeared to engage in data practices that put children’s rights at risk, contributed to undermining them, or actively infringed on these rights … Most online learning platforms installed tracking technologies that trailed children outside of their virtual classrooms and across the internet, over time …

Most online learning platforms sent or granted access to children’s data to third-party companies, usually advertising technology (AdTech) companies … Access to these insights could then be sold to anyone—advertisers, data brokers, and others.

The biggest platform of risk here is Google Classroom, used by some educators as a lightweight LMS. Google has a 10 year history of improper management of student data. For example, see this, this and this. Educators who use products from Google do so at their and their students’ risk. Google is the largest media company in the world with a business model to monetize the data it assembles. As a result, some jurisdictions have moved to prohibit their educators from using Google products, such as all schools in Denmark, the Holland region of the The Netherlands, and Germany and France (the latter two of which have banned Google AND Microsoft’s cloud-based products for education.)

No mainstream learning management system shares information with advertisers. LMSes are generally intended as closed, private platforms, supported by annual licensing fees paid by educational organizations. An exception was the free, but now-defunct, Edmodo, which actively marketed its 100 million users’ data to ad partners and even subjected users to ads in its platform as its primary revenue model in later years.

As a leading K-12 LMS provider that makes it clear it does not monetize student data, Edsby includes the following language in its Services Privacy Policy: “Edsby Service usage data is never collected by a third party, hosted elsewhere or shared with other parties or monetized. We do not sell your Personal Information or the content you provide. We do not subject users to any advertising, contextual, personal or otherwise. There is no marketing to opt-out of, as the company does not send marketing messages to end users. Edsby does not make offers to end users like sweepstakes or contests. And we do not sell, rent or otherwise share any Personal Information with any third party that does.”

Data sharing with other parties

In December of 2022, Internet Safety Labs published a report scoring 96% of all apps used in schools as “do not use” or “high risk”, primarily for sharing children’s personal information with third parties without the knowledge or consent of users or schools.

Of these apps, an article by THE Journal referencing the report wrote:

74.9% of the apps tested were scored “very high risk” for having SDK components that were “likely to share data with high-risk entities,” ISL said.

The SDK (“software development kit,” or pre-built tools that provide a software developer with shortcut features that they don’t have to build themselves) most criticized by the ISL were Google SDKs. The top five SDKs used most widely in edtech investigated by the ISL were from Google, which it characterizes as a high-risk entity given its poor record of student data handling. Google’s Firebase Analytics SDK was the top SDK used, with 67% of all apps found to be using Firebase Analytics.

Mainstream LMS users, or prospective customers, should ask their vendor whether their products incorporate the Google Firebase Analytics or other problematic SDKs.

For its part, Edsby discloses the following: “[We ensure] any software libraries used in our application are never sent Personal Information. For example, Edsby uses Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) for push notifications, but Edsby Services never send private information in notifications, simply using them to redirect the user to the secure, authenticated Edsby Services. We only use the minimal Firebase messaging toolkit, and do not engage Firebase’s analytics or wider features. Nor does Firebase ever get associated with a user’s Google account. And while Edsby uses Google’s ML Kit for QR code scanning in our mobile apps, processing is fully on-device and we ensure any data available to ML Kit is anonymous and de-identified.”

In conclusion

There’s understandable scrutiny of edtech applications today, and for good reason, according to the three latest reports cited above.

In K-12, student data must be held sacrosanct. It’s the law in most developed countries. If the applications you’ve chosen, or are considering, aren’t transparent and convincing about their handling of student data, demand to work with a vendor that is.

Edsby describes further what we don’t do with user data

Edsby has updated its Services and Website Privacy Policies. The new versions became effective February 3rd, 2023.

We’ve not made any changes in what we do with customer data. We still doesn’t monetize or do anything irresponsible with personal information. But these revised policies give more detail to minimize ambiguities. Big changes include:

• Who uses Edsby and what they do: Our policies now clarify that education organizations create Edsby accounts for their users. Users can never create their own Edsby account. And they describe how under no circumstances can students or parents ever designate anything they do in Edsby as publicly-viewable, or message anyone outside of Edsby. Therefore there are no privacy permissions for student and parent users to manage or configure incorrectly. Nor is any personal user profile information ever publicized.
• No biometric or geolocation data: Edsby has never and never will collect biometric or geolocation data on users. These new policies make this clear.
• No cross referencing or augmenting data for resale: Edsby only manages and collects information as directed by your education organization and never augments or cross references it with other data sources. Data in Edsby only exists to fulfill the services we have contracted to provide for your education organization and is not used for other commercial purpose.
• We don’t market to you: We do not subject users to any advertising, contextual, personal or otherwise. There is no marketing to opt-out of, as we do not send marketing messages to end users via our Edsby services. Edsby does not make offers to end users like sweepstakes or contests. And we do not sell, rent or otherwise share any personal information with any third party that does. We never have and never will.
• We don’t let third party code access your info: A report from Internet Safety Labs that condemns 96% of edtech apps for irresponsible data practices mostly blames certain third party code libraries used in these products for questionable handling of student data. Edsby takes measures to ensure any third party libraries used in our products are never given personally identifying information or other sensitive data. Our latest policies explain how.
• Our public website, intended for prospects: End users cannot log into Edsby services from our public website at www.edsby.com – which exists primarily for prospective education organization customers to learn about Edsby. Data collection via forms on Edsby’s public website is to identify new possible education organization customers. Edsby users never have to fill in forms on Edsby’s public website. No data collected on our website is shared with Google any longer, even for analytics, let alone remarketing.

You can always find Edsby’s latest Services Privacy Policy in its entirety here, and our Public Website Privacy Policy here. You’re also invited to read our About Edsby & User Data document.

Your continued use of Edsby is your acceptance of our revised policies.

If you have any questions about these changes, you can reach us at privacy@edsby.com. 

Why an online “walled garden” for K-12 district news and community collaboration is important in K-12

Educators may be well-meaning, but sharing school and student accomplishments on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is inviting trouble, warn researchers quoted in an article published today by Education Week.

Schools and districts that post pictures and names of students on public sites like Facebook and Twitter likely aren’t breaking the law, according to the article. But their information is easily scraped by “a lot of actors who collect open data on the web for a range of purposes, and some of them are really, really not good,” according to one of the authors of a report published today that inspired EdWeek’s article.

[On public social media sites,] student photos are ‘available to anybody in the world forever.’

The report estimates 4.9 million school Facebook posts created between 2005 and 2020 include identifiable images of students and that approximately 726,000 of those posts also include students’ first and last names and their approximate location.

Nefarious uses
These posts are available to “organizations that track criminals, foreign governments, and some very ‘nefarious’ users—including those who traffic in child pornography,” warns the report.

Students may become easier to identify from their school Facebook pictures years down the road, as facial-recognition software becomes more powerful. Researchers didn’t even need to be logged onto Facebook in order to see student photos, enlarge them, and save them. That means “potentially anyone in the world” can take a closer look at a post that, for instance, congratulates a particular student on being elected class president, using their full name and picture, said Joshua Rosenberg, one of the authors of the report.

The report and the article demonstrate the importance for K-12 communities to be able to connect in safe ways. Systems like the Edsby collaborative learning platform allow districts to share online with their educators, parents and students inside a managed, authenticated environment, with all of their exchanges safe from prying eyes on the internet. Learn more.

Partnering with a local school district helps students gain work experience, and helps Edsby build a funnel for new employees

Around the world, many companies in the technology industry are continually looking for highly educated and ready-to-work individuals who can make meaningful long-term effects. Edsby is no exception. The company’s focus on K-12 makes for an obvious source of potential talent: high school co-operative education.

Co-operative education

Often referred to as “co-op,” this system combines academic programs with professional experience. It solves two needs: real-world work experience for students and access to emerging talent for businesses.

Identifying students

In 2017, Edsby partnered with York Region School District (YRDSB) near its offices in the Toronto, Canada area to find talented local students who show skills in computer programming, software development, and engineering. While the board’s co-op program is for students in Grade 11 and 12, any student over 15 years old and with a subject-specific credit in a course related to the co-operative education placement can enroll. Edsby is fortunate to work with excellent teachers who recommend students to work with the Edsby team. Julie Oke, Edsby’s co-op mentor, then interviews the students.

“Over the years, we’ve built a strong relationship with the co-op teachers at two local York Region schools. Their dedication to finding and building relationships with both students and community partners is what makes the co-op program beneficial to everyone,” says Julie.

Benefits of co-operative education

Co-op work allows students to develop self-confidence. With Edsby, local students acquire hands-on experience, strengthen employability skills, networks, and earn credits toward their Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD).

“Our co-operative education students benefit so much from the hands-on experiences they gain by being immersed in the community. With strong supervisors, our students learn transferrable soft skills. They acquire industry-specific knowledge and competencies that cannot be learned in a traditional classroom. The learning achieved through our dedicated supervisor/facilitators enables these students to gain insights into their career pathways or areas of interest. It enhances and furthers their mastery in both narrow and broad-spectrum areas,” says Michele Axelrod, Interim Head of Department Co-operative Education, Richmond Hill High School.

Not only do the students benefit from the co-op program, but community supervisors also benefit from working with a new team of students every semester. Julie says, “Before we joined the co-op, I’d never lead a team of people. The co-op program gave me the opportunity to develop my mentoring skills. Twice a year, I get a new team, and I can keep building and refining our mentoring program.”

Edsby’s success with co-op programs

After four years, students and teachers can attribute Edsby’s success in the co-op program to its mentorship. “Edsby has been an outstanding community co-op partner. Edsby allows our students to meet, connect and work with professionals in software development. They mentor and work alongside our students to help them discover and explore a variety of interests in the field of computer science. We are privileged to have such a great working relationship with an organization that values student inspiration and development,” says Mike Mastrandrea, Counsellor & Head of Co-operative education in the Tommy Douglas Secondary School.

Real opportunities and solid software experience

Real-world experience in software development is a great “plus point.” Being a co-op for a real software firm is the best way to gain that experience.

“Edsby is a wonderful place for high school co-op students. The teams’ strong work ethic, friendly nature, and warm and cozy environment make this one of the best places to work at your co-op term, especially for Computer Science Majors like myself. While working here, I got to see the inner workings of Edsby. I also created videos to help customers, created promotional material for the company using the product, and participated in the most practical task, Quality Assurance (QA). I would say QA was crucial as it’s a set of standards that we have to meet to have a successful and reliable product,” says Mathu Manimaran, a former Grade 11 co-op student.

Given that Edsby is made for K-12 students and teachers, having articulate and thoughtful high school students on the team is a great advantage. One of the responsibilities of being part of the Edsby co-op program is to be the student’s voice in product development decisions. When the company wants to know what’s important and valuable to students, it asks them. By 11th Grade, they are experts at being a K-12 student, and Edsby benefits from that expertise.

Better software through creativity

Although Edsby’s co-op program focuses on software development and engineering, other skillsets are assets. Tiffany Tjong joined the Edsby co-op program to explore how she could use her artistic talents as a career. Quickly, she realized that her sort of creativity is an important part of the software development process.

“Ever since I joined Edsby as a Co-op student in my final year of high school, I was treated as an equal. It’s not often that you get a company that genuinely values your ideas and hard work. I enjoyed working at Edsby so much that I returned for a paid full-time stint in the summer and as an intern during my first two years at university. I enjoyed working alongside caring mentors and exceptional teams and being a crucial part of exciting new features,” says Tiffany.

New horizons

For Edsby, hiring a summer student is about investing in a future workforce. It’s about helping to develop a generation of learners, thinkers, problem-solvers, and leaders. It also provides students with vital job experience, a feeling of purpose, responsibility, and exposure to belonging to an organization.

It’s a joy at Edsby to see students join the company as co-ops. They develop into trusted and valuable team members. “It was a blast to be a co-op and work full-time with Edsby. It helped me with the fundamental skills I needed for Computer Science,” says Mathu.

Edsby uniquely enables many of the goals of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding available to U.S. school districts

COVID-19 has revealed long-standing needs and inequities within K-12, but it’s also offered an opportunity to reimagine teaching and learning. Unprecedented funding for education in the U.S. is enabling states, local education agencies, and individual schools to invest in the infrastructure, technology, and evidence-based programs that will advance equity, accelerate learning, better support student mental health and well being, and improve outcomes for all students.

Edsby: a single platform supporting many ESSER goals

The Edsby social learning environment puts connections between people at the center of K-12 education. It enables in-person, hybrid, and online learning with rich communication between students, teachers, and families all in a single platform designed to support K-12 student success. For more than 10 years, school districts, states, and countries have used Edsby to streamline and manage student well being, classroom management, learning management, assessment and reporting, and learning analytics.

Edsby advances several of the top priorities of ESSER and the long-term strategic goals of districts and schools. Here’s how…

Other ways Edsby addresses the most important uses of funds allowed under ESSER

• Providing mental health services and supports.
• Addressing learning loss among students, including low-income students, students with disabilities, English learners, racial and ethnic minorities, students experiencing homelessness, and children in foster care, including by:
  • Administering and using high-quality assessments that are valid and reliable to accurately track students’ academic progress and assist educators in meeting students’ needs, including through differentiating instruction.
  • Implementing evidence-based activities to meet the comprehensive needs of students.
  • Providing information and assistance to parents and families on how they can effectively support their children, including during distance learning.
  • Tracking student attendance and improving student engagement during distance learning.
  • Providing principals and other school leaders with resources to address the unique needs of their individual schools.
• Supporting activities to address the unique needs of low-income children or students, children with disabilities, English learners, racial and ethnic minorities, students experiencing homelessness, and foster care youth.
• Purchasing educational technology for students served by the LEA that aids in regular and substantive educational interactions between students and their classroom teachers, including low-income students and children with disabilities.

America.

Its traditions run deep when it comes to many things, like:

• Imperial measurement
• Theme parks, and
• Number and letter grade assessment in K-12…

But change is afoot, at least in the last point.

In the U.S., momentum is growing to move away from traditional point-based grading systems, aiming to close large academic gaps among racial, ethnic and economic groups. The trend was apparently accelerated by pandemic school closures that caused troubling increases in Ds and Fs across the country and by calls to examine the role of institutionalized racism in schools in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, according to a new article from the L.A. Times.

Two of the country’s largest school districts have recently directed teachers to base academic grades on whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines, according to the Times article. The policies encourage teachers to give students opportunities to revise essays or retake tests to show that they have met learning goals, rather than enforcing hard deadlines.

Strands, Outcome-Based Assessment & More
Assessment and reporting in other areas of the world moved on from number and letter grades some time ago. In its article, the Times noted the United States lags other countries in modernizing grading.

In Canada, for example, it’s common for students to receive separate grades for academic achievement, participation, punctuality and effort. That makes each assessment more meaningful than a grade that’s a hodgepodge of factors that can vary from teacher to teacher.

Support For The Future of Assessment
The popularity of the Edsby social learning platform for K-12 in countries such as Canada informed its investment in building advanced assessment & reporting capabilities years ago. Edsby allows educators to assess to expectations, standards, outcomes and competencies (ESOCs) and even report in multi-level stranded schemes. The Edsby gradebook and built-in report card workflow system support the world’s most advanced assessment & reporting models natively, without plugins or custom development.

Support for formative assessment and the capture of learning evidence, showing pictures and videos of students’ work tagged to standards, is also central to assessment & reporting in Edsby.

Read details of where those interviewed by the L.A. Times article think K-12 assessment in the U.S. is going in its article here.