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The North East School Division (NESD) is a public school district north of Regina, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The district manages 21 school communities in Treaty 4, 5 and 6 lands, areas covered by historical treaties between the Canadian government and Indigenous peoples. It is one of the newest districts in Saskatchewan to begin using the Edsby digital learning and data platform for K-12, which has organically grown to be the province’s de facto assessment and parent system, courtesy of its direct connection to the provincial student information system MySchoolSask (MSS), built on Aspen by Follett.

NESD has been using Edsby since 2020 for its 4,740 students, their parents and staff. It uses it to enhance learning, collect feedback from students and parents, connect with the community, monitor progress, gather statistics and ensure students success.

NESD Edsby “Innovation Sprint”

In the 2022-23 school year, five NESD teachers volunteered to be part of an exercise to focus on exploring ways Edsby could support and enhance student learning. They worked together for two cycles (November to April) as an “innovation sprint” and met weekly to discuss progress towards their goals and reflect on the impact Edsby had on their selected strategies. Core to their efforts were using Edsby as their primary way to collect, share and reflect on evidence of student learning.

“My goal was to increase student reflection and as well as parent engagement using Edsby as a tool. And it worked.”
– Kristin Lee, PAA teacher and career councillor, North East School Division

Stephanie Pipke-Painchaud, Coordinator of Learning at North East School Division, documented the team’s results in her “Curriculum Corner Live” video series.

Video 1: Grade 1 Documentation of Learning

First grade teacher Connie Parenteau reflected on how the Edsby Learning Story can help assess ELA learning goals and help students become more reflective in their work. Connie shared examples of students working with the Edsby learning story in Grade 1.

Video 2: Communicating Student Progress (Diversity Lens)

Carnie Carr, a diversity education teacher in NESD, spoke about how progress of students with IIPs could be authentically communicated with Edsby. Carnie shared how this process has engaged parents and helped clarify student progress.

Video 3: Reflective Digital Documentation in Arts Ed & Band

Rebecca Will, arts education and band teacher, discussed what documentation and active reflection looks like using Edsby to support student engagement.

Video 4: Documentation of Learning in PAA

Kristin Lee, PAA teacher and career councillor, spoke about how she is using the Edsby Learning Story & digital documentation to help students assess where they are at in their learning. She also dug into how to engage parents in this process.

Lee made it her primary goal to increase both her students’ reflection and their parents’ engagement using Edsby. By integrating Edsby’s Learning Story and Grade Book features, she crafted a comprehensive approach to digital documentation that not only involved students in their learning process but also actively engaged parents.

Video 5: Connecting with students and parents

Scott Sorestad, a previous NESD Google Classroom teacher, reflected on the ways he learned to use Edsby tools to engage and connect more with both students and parents beyond what he was able to with Classroom.

NESD explored Edsby’s integration with Google Classroom and Google Drive. It allowed students to seamlessly upload their work from Google Drive into Edsby, much like they could with Classroom, creating a smooth and intuitive workflow.

Features for teachers, documented

NESD has helped its educators on their journey to make use of Edsby’s features to better connect with both students and parents. Its videos are standing resources to help educators, present and future, best understand how to leverage the Edsby learning platform.

“In the Learning Story, we found parents can comment back and forth along with the students. In the Edsby Grade Book, the student can comment back, and the parent can see it. This can create a child-to-parent relationship even in the teaching environment.”

– Stephanie Pipke-Painchaud, Coordinator of Learning, North East School Division

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Saskatchewan continues to move to the Edsby digital learning platform, with the vast majority of the province’s school divisions having now chosen the system.

In a recent board meeting, the Holy Family Roman Catholic Separate School Division revealed its plans for teachers to begin using Edsby for attendance, report cards, sharing learning evidence captured in classrooms with parents and letting families know about district, school and class news.

According to a news article from Sasktoday.ca, “other school divisions already use the system … and users note that it’s easy to use for communications between school and home.”

Outcomes-based assessment and reporting key

Most school divisions in Saskatchewan have independently chosen Edsby as their primary system for teaching and learning. The primary reason: its unique ability to connect with the province’s student information system (MySchoolSask, or MSS, based on Aspen by Follett) to enable the province’s outcomes-based assessment and reporting methodology for tracking and reporting K-12 student progress towards learning mastery. Local educators can comply with Ministry assessment directives while teaching and assessing using locally adopted strategies.

Teachers will be using it for everything from attendance and report cards, to showing portfolio items from their students to their parents, or letting parents know about events at school or in the class.

-Sasktoday.ca, Holy Family school division to move to Edsby platform in fall

Wide adoption of Edsby across Canada

Edsby has proven popular elsewhere in Canada. It’s been licensed by one of the country’s three territories. And it’s seen remarkable adoption in the country’s most populous province, Ontario, where 1 in 5 school districts independently choose to use Edsby, even though Ontario makes a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) available to them for free. In Ontario alone, 62 private schools, including some of the country’s most prestigious, have also independently elected to use Edsby.

In Ontario, as in Saskatchewan, Edsby’s success continues to be driven by its attention to local pedagogy, tight synchronization with local student information systems and unique community engagement capabilities.

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The country of New Zealand is remarkable for many reasons. Among them: the unique structure of its education system.

New Zealand has more than 2,500 schools in its 13-year primary, intermediate and secondary systems. And while they’re a mix of state (public), integrated (faith-based or specialist education, e.g. Montessori) and private schools, each school operates autonomously. There are few regional governing bodies. Each school chooses its own technology infrastructure, including its databases and learning applications.

While empowering local educators, this independence creates challenges.

Far-flung data wasn’t available when needed
It’s been difficult for the New Zealand Ministry of Education to support consistent data sharing between schools to enable the best learning outcomes across the country when they’re all using different systems. But a bigger problem was even more pronounced.

Educators found it hard to access valuable information about learners when they moved between schools. Information stayed locked in their previous school’s systems or took a long time to obtain. Sometimes children didn’t get the right support when they needed it.

“We heard needless stories of kids missing out on learning support like reading recovery, because by the time it was identified that they’d already been assessed for it, they were too old,” said Lisa Cheney, Business Design Lead in a Ministry of Education Te Rito video.

“We also surveyed a number of teachers across New Zealand to find out what was going wrong with learner information, and were horrified to find that on average people were spending about 25 minutes a day on what I would call no value-add stuff.”

If relevant information could be made available, safely and securely and at the right times, children could receive the support they needed to achieve better learning and well-being outcomes, the Ministry believed. It began exploring how to enable richer information flows so learners could be supported to succeed at every stage of their education journey.

Massive ambition and project scope
The Ministry embarked on a three-year procurement process to determine if commercial technology existed that could allow it to obtain latest information from each of its schools nationwide, centralize it and make it available safely to stakeholders across the country. The project’s scope was vast: synchronize information on more than 800,000 learners across thousands of schools and their unique systems every day, using open standards if possible, and other secure connections if not.

In 2018, the Ministry selected Edsby and its Unison education data platform and managed service, and began to work with the company to customize the solution to its needs. Edsby’s social learning system and underlying Unison data platform had been proven at scale, safely managing the data of K-12 users around the world since 2010.

“Me tiaki te mana o te tamaiti me tana whānau – Te Rito protects the mana of the child and their family, and connects the data of the child to the owners of that data: the child and their parents. This is done over the entirety of their primary and secondary education and is to eventually include their early childhood and tertiary education, providing a seamless system for parents and students to track their education journey over time.”

Myles Ferris, Chair – Ngā Rau Whakatupu Māori (Māori medium)

Safeguarding student data the overriding objective
The Ministry’s high profile project was renamed Te Rito, after the inner leaves of the indigenous harakeke (flax) plant. With the underlying purpose of the project being to enhance student information sharing for the well-being and educational success of the learner, the name references project’s guiding principle, which is to protect and uphold the mana, or integrity and respect, of the child and their whanau, or families. It also evokes the national data storage facility in which all the learner’s information is stored, where it requires input and protection from vendors, schools, the Ministry and other stakeholders.

Keeping information safe and maintaining privacy of this national data repository was paramount from the start of the project. The Ministry invested heavily in the underlying security of Unison’s communication with its systems. The internationally adopted Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) was adopted and localized, and now powers many of the integrations. Provisions were made for rigorous, ongoing penetration testing of the many ways Unison receives and transmits information to and from schools, Ministry of Education and other government systems.

Following a high-profile breach of data in 2022 in an unrelated New Zealand government application, the Ministry paused the Te Rito program out of an abundance of caution. Satisfied with Te Rito’s security, it re-started the program in March, 2023, with a strong sector-led model to ensure the project delivers what stakeholders need. The relaunched project has an even broader scope and vision and a renewed multi-year commitment to Edsby and Unison as enabling technology.

“Te Rito has the ability to support whānau / families to better engage in their child’s education and build better relationships with their teachers.”

Myles Ferris,  Chair – Ngā Rau Whakatupu Māori (Māori medium)

Enabling country-wide collaboration
Te Rito’s original scope was a national electronic student records system with a lifelong record of learning encompassing pre-school, compulsory, tertiary and on-going adult learning. Now, Te Rito is expanding to provide additional capabilities to the country’s schools.

Every school now has no-cost access to a modern, feature-rich system for teachers, students and parents to interact via browser or mobile device, with accounts automatically set up for all the school’s users. It enables local school community engagement, learning management, assessment, student well-being features and more. It is being expanded with features to enable country-wide educator sharing and collaboration.

Te Rito is receiving stakeholder feedback and buy-in. Since being made available to New Zealand schools in September, 2023, more than 200 schools have opted in, with their data synchronized to the Ministry’s secure repository. New schools are being added every week.

The Pūtauaki ki Rangitaiki Kāhui Ako in New Zealand’s Eastern Bay of Plenty were the first schools and kura (Māori-language immersion schools) in the country to have access to Te Rito in an early-stage rollout of the platform. The pilot helped the Ministry investigate shared concerns and trends and give local principals and school leaders the ability to help shape the service.

Rachel Chater, Principal at Kawerau Pūtauaki School, highlighted the transformative impact of Te Rito. “Te Rito has provided our Kāhui Ako with the means to quantify the level of learning support required and identify specific needs across the cluster. This has allowed us to strategically allocate resources, leading to improved outcomes for our ākonga. It has also enabled us to collaboratively engage with a range of agencies, fostering creative access to additional support.”

Positive impact
Te Rito is being welcomed by educators as way to better support students when they transfer. “With the secure data set stored in Te Rito, educators will ‘know their learners before they teach them’ which will greatly support strength-based teaching and learning and a success focused learning journey for ākonga / students,” said Graeme Barber, Chair – Ngā Rau Whakatupu Auraki (English medium).

Information as key
The Ministry is co-designing and delivering Te Rito working closely with two sector working groups: Te Rau Whakatupu Māori for Māori medium and Te Rau Whakatupu Auraki for English medium. An independent Te Rito Kaitiakitanga Group is being established to provide stewardship of information held in Te Rito and make recommendations on the access and use of learner and ākonga data.

“We don’t know exactly what the future will look like. But we know that making information available to those who need it is key,” the Ministry acknowledges. With Te Rito, “the education environment becomes richer and educators and government agencies can start to shape investment and decisions, including about policy and practice, based on information that’s accurately, timely and trusted.”

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The American School in Japan (ASIJ) is a private, non-profit international school located in Tokyo. Founded in 1902, it offers an American-style education to students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.

ASIJ has a diverse student body, representing over 60 nationalities. Its mission is to provide a challenging and supportive learning environment that nurtures the development of 1,700 students across four schools: early learning, elementary, middle and high school.

Constrained by previous systems

In 2016, ASIJ determined it needed to modernize and migrate from its legacy systems. Its previous student information system (SIS) was so old administrators needed to install a terminal emulator to use it. Teachers weren’t able to look up parent contact info, and even had to ask the office for parent email addresses.

The bigger problem, according to ASIJ, was its learning management system (LMS). Its previous system didn’t have a gradebook and was simply used as a repository for documents, with folders full of PDFs. Teachers had to use a separate standalone electronic gradebook, which led to one of students’ biggest concerns in satisfaction surveys: not having visibility into how their grades were calculated. Teachers didn’t have access to photos of the children they were teaching. In the absence of a calendar in its LMS, students had to cross-reference a schedule document or build their own calendar to know what classes they had on a particular day.

“We had a hodgepodge of solutions. Everyone was on their own. Every student had a completely unique experience in every class. Most students had 8 different electronic destinations to go to,” said ASIJ Director of Technology Warren Apel.

Review process

The organization’s leadership team determined it wanted the following in its new systems:

• A grade book that would help support the move away from calculated percentages and towards standards-based grading. It wanted to provide effective feedback to students while moving the focus away from calculated average numerical grades.
• The ability to share student academic progress across teams, so teachers, counselors, and administration could know how students are doing in all of their classes
• A way for teachers to privately document and share observations about students’ social-emotional needs and challenges
• Quick access by teachers to important emergency information, such as medical notes (allergies, etc.) and home contact details
• Analytic reports for counselors and administrators to use data to inform programmatic decisions, instruction and student progress

ASIJ selected a new LMS first. It reviewed over a dozen platforms and narrowed its selection to two contenders. Teacher focus groups and surveys strongly preferred Edsby to the other front-runner.

“When we demonstrated both systems to teachers and school leaders, they were far more impressed with the Edsby interface and with the additional features and options Edsby provided,” wrote Apel in a memo to school leadership in 2017 announcing Edsby’s selection.

Download as PDF >

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Toronto’s TanenbaumCHAT is the largest community Jewish high school in North America. Delivering a dual General and Jewish studies curriculum and incredible depth and breadth of programming to more than 1,000 students can be challenging at the best of times. Doing all of that in the midst of a global pandemic only added to the complexity in recent years.

The Edsby social learning environment has become intrinsic to the day-to-day functioning of the school and an important component of school life.

No surprises
“If, tomorrow, Edsby were to suddenly become unavailable, it would be devastating,” says Avital Aharon, TanenbaumCHAT’s Director of Educational Technology. The school employs Edsby more extensively than many school districts, using it for a wide array of uses, such as daily attendance, learning management, report cards, and team and club activities.

“Edsby is used by every stakeholder and every type of professional in our building, including the admin assistants, guidance department and Deans’ office. With its sync to our various databases, we’ve got everything, even educational alerts and IEPs, all in one place,” says Aharon.

The academic assessment and reporting core of Edsby is key at TanenbaumCHAT. “Edsby is central. Parents have real-time views into student achievement and activities, and always know what’s going on. There are rarely any surprises,” she says.

Before Edsby report cards became available, the school, students and parents had to access another system to find grades. It was not as seamless, digital or robust.

Facilitating community
TanenbaumCHAT’s extended population includes more than 8,000 alumni. Edsby’s unique, moderated school newsfeed can be tapped into by Alumni Relations staff to help share school news to the wider community.

The school boasts around 100 student-run clubs and committees that are all established at a huge fair at the beginning of every year. Any student may suggest a club as long as there is a teacher-supervisor in place. Edsby’s Groups capability is a natural hub for these activities. “Students use groups in every possible way you can imagine. From file libraries to resources to polls,” says Aharon. “Name the topic, there’s a club about it on Edsby,” she says.

One group is particularly popular. “Today our Politics Club reached a whopping 100,000 posts! We might need professional help for our Edsby addiction. Summer withdrawal is going to be an issue,” wrote Politics Club moderator Eliyahu F. at the end of the 2020-2021 school year.

Edsby’s Report Inappropriate feature allows users, including students, to flag items for office review. Every item that is flagged is looked at by a staff member, leading to teachable moments, according to Aharon. “There’s no way everyone can monitor every single post, so the feature is crucial,” she says. “It provides a mechanism for teaching K to 12 digital citizenship.”

Staff love Edsby
The breadth and ease of use of Edsby is always a surprise to new staff if they’ve never used it before, notes Aharon. “We welcomed and trained 17 new teachers this year. There are always a lot of ‘oohs and ahs! We can do this?!’” Teaching Edsby and explaining how to make it work for their virtual classroom is exciting.”

There’s no question that Edsby has impressed students, staff and parents alike and is an indispensable part of life at TanenbaumCHAT.

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In examining its agility regarding COVID-19, the Winnipeg Free Press describes local private school Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute’s adoption of Edsby as a “key decision,” creating “consistency for both staff and families, as both groups only had to learn just one system.”

Principal Andrea Neufeld told the newspaper many positives came from the switch. In addition to overall student participation, Edsby has also contributed to innovating more creative learning environments and lesson curriculum.

“The different environment and creative approaches to lessons allowed some students who were often quiet in the classroom to be more active contributors. The school’s project-based learning approach was also a good fit for the new reality,” Neufeld states.

MCBI also notes that though they were some bumps in transitioning to online learning, Edsby and the MCBI shared leadership model made the sudden format switch easier for some teachers and staff.

“It’s about how quickly you can mobilize,” Neufeld continues. “When kids can feel connected and cared for, learning can happen.”

In addition to connecting teachers with their students, Edsby has also allowed for increased communication between school administrators and parents. This is credited to not only Edsby’s easy facilitation of parental participation, but also Mennonite Brethren’s dedication to providing Chromebooks to families who needed them.

As a result, “instruction continued in all courses, including the drama program, which took a creative approach to the pandemic… we’ve kept the rigor and kept the innovation,” Neufeld concludes.

To read the full article, click the link here.

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Lakehead Public Schools is boosting graduation rates among students at risk. And it’s using core Edsby features in innovative ways to do it.

Lakehead Public Schools oversees secular English-language public schools in and around the city of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Of its 8,750 students, 30 percent of them are indigenous First Nations, Métis (mixed indigenous and Euro-American ancestry) and Inuit, or FNMI. And it’s this FNMI population that’s particularly at academic risk.

Consistent with a new national focus on reconciliation and learning equity, district appointed “graduation coaches” at Lakehead focus on its FNMI students. And it’s these coaches and guidance counsellors, using Edsby in creative ways, that have improved graduation rates among this key population.

The district found Edsby could play a unique role in helping information flow between school offices, attendance secretaries, coaches, counsellors and teachers. And it’s far more efficient than the old ways of doing things, staff acknowledge.

“This is likely what all schools need. They just don’t know it yet.”

– Gino Russo, Information Technology Resource Teacher, Lakehead Public Schools

Edsby panorama and monitor groups
“Before Edsby, guidance counsellors and graduation coaches would have to go to teachers and say, ’I hear this student is failing your class. I don’t know if you knew he had trauma as a child,’” said Gino Russo, Lakehead Public Schools Information Technology Resource Teacher and Edsby lead.

With Edsby, Russo says, ad hoc insights like these now get entered in students’ Edsby panoramas as observations. These observations are then visible to school or district staff having permission to see them, including the student’s current teachers right on their Edsby desktops.

“If a secretary calls home, she puts the details in the student’s panorama. If a principal has something they want staff to know about a particular student, they put it in his or her panorama. In our most at-risk cohort, we’re seeing about 20 of these observations made every day,” said Russo, noting that the real power of Edsby is having these sorts of observations seen—and acted upon by staff—within the same, single platform a student’s teachers are already using for classroom management, assessment and parent communication.

Monitor groups
Another key Edsby component in Lakehead’s student success workflow are private Edsby monitor groups. They allow graduation coaches and guidance counsellors to confidentially and securely discuss intervention strategies, ideas and concerns regarding these cohorts of students right within Edsby. Students are often entered into these groups by school secretaries investigating and recording more than two unexcused absences as a leading risk indicator. Or by teachers flagging students at risk from within their Edsby gradebooks.

The district says Edsby monitor groups are superior to other approaches it has tried and it looks forward to continued enhancements.

“Before Edsby, we didn’t have a tool to do this at all. Our coaches and counsellors had to seek out teachers where they could. With this, we’ve at least got a system, and it’s making a difference,” said Russo.

Again, Russo emphasizes, the success of the district’s monitor groups are their integration into everything else Edsby does in the way of communication and assessment.

“LMSes don’t do intervention management. I can’t add a note about a student at all. But if you’re going to try to help a student, you need the full picture, everything in one place. An educator can get a student’s panorama with one click and get everything the district knows about them, including their parents’ contact information,” said Russo.

“Before Edsby, we didn’t have a tool to do this at all. Our coaches and counsellors had to seek out teachers where they could. With this, we’ve at least got a system, and it’s making a difference.”

– Gino Russo, Information Technology Resource Teacher, Lakehead Public Schools

Has Edsby had a measurable effect on Lakehead’s graduation rates?

“Oh, yes,” said Russo. “We’re keeping more kids in school and they’re graduating. Without question.”

“We actually bought Edsby specifically as a student intervention tool when we saw it could do all this. This is likely what all schools need. They just don’t know it yet,” he said.

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Edsby is entering into a trial in schools across South Africa’s Western Cape province

A region-wide trial of Edsby is getting underway in the South African province of Western Cape.

The Western Cape Education Department (WCED) selected Edsby in a solution review, provided approval for the pilot in WCED schools and helped choose schools for the project.

Western Cape is the southernmost South African province, with coasts bordering the Indian and Atlantic oceans. It’s one of the nine new South African provinces established in 1994 and is where port city of Cape Town is located, nestled beneath famous Table Mountain. In Table Bay, Robben Island is the notorious prison that once held Nelson Mandela, now a museum. Farther afield, vineyards surround historical towns like Stellenbosch, Franschhoek and Paarl where some of the country’s best wines are produced.

There are six million people in the province, and 1.2 million K-12 students.

The Western Cape’s Edsby system will be hosted in South Africa in new world-class Azure cloud datacenters just opened by Microsoft.

“It’s critical to state, provincial and national customers that their public sector data such as education information reside within their region,” said Edsby CEO and co-founder John Myers in a pilot kickoff session today. “Our relationship with Microsoft has enabled us to leverage Microsoft’s investment in Azure data centres around the world, including the recently opened Azure centres in South Africa. This enables Edsby to conform to South African data sovereignty requirements, and local servers also mean excellent performance for local users.”

After pilot schools’ data is connected to local Edsby servers, local teacher and administrator training is scheduled for September. Edsby is to be open to selected Western Cape students and parents in January, 2020.

Financial support is being generously provided by two organizations with a long history of supporting public education in South Africa: Pick n Pay, the second largest supermarket chain store in the country, and Woolworths, a large local retailer.

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