K12 Schools Must Fill Need For Digital Media Skills
There is a new urgency to teach digital media literacy as a study finds students are taking online information for granted
You can add to the growing number of buzzwords influencing K12 education in the 21st century—from “annual yearly progress” to “professional learning communities”— the word “SIFication.” That’s what Patrick Plant, the Anoka-Hennepin (Minn.) School District’s director of technology and information services, calls the expanding efforts of districts like his to streamline data management.
The Schools Interoperability Framework, a set of specifications created a decade ago to allow diverse educational software applications to interact and share information automatically, has come of age. District leaders across the country say that turning to SIF-compliant software has made a noticeable impact when it comes to fulfilling another popular administrative mantra—data-driven decision making.
According to the SIF Association (SIFA)—a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization that offers information, workshops, and conferences for vendors as well as school districts, regional service agencies, and state departments of education—membership has soared from just 68 five years ago to more than 2,000 by the end of 2008 and has doubled in the past year alone.
The surge in SIF’s popularity dates from the release two-and-a-half years ago of the 2.0 version of the specifications, which increased the kinds of data that could be shared among applications; added attendance, discipline, and grade book functionality; and allowed electronic exchanges of student records. SIFA Executive Director Larry Fruth explains that SIF is increasingly becoming the standard for a new generation of administrative software programs.
“One of the applications that’s becoming a really hot topic is facilities management,” Fruth notes. “And that means, ‘I want to have a lot of the data about my building in the hands of the teachers and administrators.’ Another one even more recently is health, ‘school-nurse’ information. There are a lot of applications being built around that. Those kinds of interoperability weren’t on anyone’s radar screen five years ago.”
These new applications connect via SIF to student information systems such as Pearson’s SASIxp and PowerSchool and get easy access to their centralized pool of data, from student ID numbers to home addresses. The process works via a Zone Integration Server (ZIS)—a piece of software that sits on the end user’s server, either at the school, district, region or state level, and acts as communications center—and a SIF agent, which is a utility tool built into compliant software applications. The ZIS and SIF agents are able to transfer student information to each other using a cross-platform language called Extensible Markup Language (XML). For example, Edustructures just launched the SIFWorks ZIS Enterprise edition, which delivers in part the benefits of SIF standardization with the flexibility of custom data manipulation and user and group account management.
SIF Savings
While the workings of SIF are not that visible, the results are hard to miss. According to SIFA, the 130,000-student Duvall County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Fla., has saved more than $500,000 (and an estimated $200,000 in lost productivity) a year by eliminating the need to create and maintain accounts across different software programs.
The smaller Vail Unified School District near Tucson, Ariz., has seen its own share of gains. “I love SIF. It rocks. It has saved us so much grief,” exults Matt Federoff, the director of technology for Vail. “We don’t buy anything now that doesn’t have a SIF agent.”
Federoff had known about SIF since its inception in 1999 but waited until the release of the 2.0 version, which worked with the Apple OS X server that the district preferred. He noticed an immediate improvement over past data management practices. For example, a teacher takes a class to the computer lab but two students cannot log on because one forgets his password and the other just joined the class. “The teacher wasted five precious minutes” getting someone in network support to create an account, he says.
By contrast, an authentication system facilitated by SIF and tied to PowerSchool creates a valid account automatically and furnishes student desktops with the icons for any needed applications. “It takes 34 seconds,” says Federoff. “We’ve timed it.”
