NEWS
New Report Provides Comprehensive Insights on the State of Interoperability and Privacy Across K-12 Districts and Schools
PRWeb
Today, Project Unicorn unveiled its 2024 State of the Sector Report, which analyzes the current state of interoperability and privacy best practices in the K-12 education sector. This report presents comprehensive insights from a national sample of school districts, focusing on data interoperability in K-12 education.
Easing the Burden on Schools: Five Quality Indicators for Edtech & AI Products
InnovateEDU Erin Mote
Today, it is far too challenging for schools to determine if an edtech product is of sufficient quality to be used by teachers and students. Every school system must independently conduct a detailed review process for any app before it can be approved for use. This is a massive duplication of effort that wastes time for school leaders who are already overwhelmed with other critical responsibilities. This burden is only increasing with the surge of new AI tools hitting the market. The 2024 National Educational Technology Plan highlights the need for intentional and critical decision-making to harness the power of edtech in teaching and learning. To fulfill this vision, we must urgently seek strategies to reduce the lift for school systems to identify quality digital learning tools.
New Buying Guide Aims to Show Educators How to Improve Ed-Tech Purchasing
EdWeek Market Brief Michele Molnar
One goal of “Better Edtech Buying for Educators: A Practical Guide”—which is being released today by the two organizations at SXSWedu—is to improve collaboration between teachers and district officials in choosing what digital tools they use.
Let’s Not Blow $190 Billion
EdTech Diget Troy Wheeler
We’re back to school after one of the most challenging years in education. There’s no doubt a laundry list of priorities are on every state and district’s radar – implementing health and safety measures, addressing learning loss, offering new teacher trainings, closing the digital equity gap, the list goes on.
The Use of Single Sign-On in Interoperability
Single sign-on technology not only helps ensure student data security, it can also drive efficiencies in the classroom and across the school district.
Why Teachers Need Interoperability — Whether They Know it or Not
EdSurge Sam Peterson
Imagine a world in which a teacher begins the school year with a comprehensive personal profile of each student in her class—a report that incorporates insights on academic performance, social-emotional development, behavior, attendance and a host of related data….
Empowering Teaching and Learning with Interoperability
A quick search of the words “interoperability” and “education” yields over 21 million results. Considering this massive volume, this combination of topics is clearly on the hearts and minds of teachers and students…
What are project unicorn and the interoperability rubric
Edlink Jordan Clark
“The Interoperability Rubric is a fantastic way to get started understanding how well your product supports interoperability in edtech. Analyze how you’re exchanging data to and from schools. Is it secure? Is it in a standardized format? Is it simple to export and import usable data to and from my product? Ask yourself these questions as you go through the rubric and begin to brainstorm how to incorporate interoperability into your product.”
iSTE reLEASES A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR EDUCATORS ON BUYING EDTECH
Getting Smart Emily Liebtag
To support market demands and inform procurement decisions, ISTE along with Project Unicorn, created the Better Edtech Buying for Educators: A Practical Guide.
Future of Learning: Dispatches from iNACOL 2018
The Hechinger Report Tara García Mathewson
Project Unicorn is among the leading advocates for interoperability, which refers to the technical side of making that data merge possible. Now schools can search for interoperable products in the Project Unicorn Product Library, powered by LearnPlatform, for free.
From virtual reality to ebooks, the future of digital media in schools is a total toss-up
GeekWire Frank Catalano
Once student data gets tied to digital content, usually as a kid’s account for a learning product, getting the data out so it can be used by teachers for grade books and other software remains a hairball. Project Unicorn is a non-profit initiative to get both districts and vendors to pledge to make education data interoperable.
interoperability is finally getting the spotlight it deserves
CoSN Chloe Sanducci
Project Unicorn Director Chloe Sanducci shares insights on the importance of data interoperability in our schools systems’ evolving technological landscape, implementation progress, and where we can go from here.
How Modern Data Management Platforms Help K-12 Schools Get Work Done
Adam Stone
Districts are using technology to track student attainment, manage ed tech investments and automate digital workflows.
WHAT IS INTEROPERABILITY ANYWAY? DATA STANDARDS IMPROVE EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES
TRICIA FARRIS
Let’s take a closer look and dive into what interoperability means for the education ecosystem. The data interoperability initiative Project Unicorn defines interoperability as “the seamless, secure, and controlled exchange of data between applications.”
5 Tips for Effectively Curating Student Data
Rebecca Torchia
K–12 districts can enact meaningful change when they know how to properly collect and analyze the data at their fingertips.
ISTE and Project Unicorn Release EdTech Buying Guide for Educators
Tech & Learning TL Editors
In an increasingly complex digital landscape, educators and staff responsible for purchasing decisions have a lot to consider,
Project Unicorn Advocates for Smart Educational Data Usage
EdLab Sara Hardman
Project Unicorn thinks using data in a smarter way will only improve instruction, parent-teacher relationships, and a school’s impact in a community, and they hope to get enough districts and vendors committed to making a big difference.
Advancing Data Interoperability in Public Education—3 Pain Points and Their Solutions
EdSurve Melissa Gedney
Resources like the Project Unicorn Rubric can help districts think through smaller, incremental ways to solve for security and privacy—moving from linguistic student identifiers to unique numeric student identifiers, for example. Moving toward a new data standard creates ways to manage this data in a more unified and secure way, building tight and enforceable protocols that can move districts further along in all categories.
5 Levers That Can Unlock Smarter Demand for Education Technology
EdSurge Julia Freeland Fisher
"Put differently, simply asking “what works” stops short of the real question at the heart of a truly personalized system: What works, for which students, in what circumstances? Without this level of specificity and understanding of contextual factors, we’ll be stuck understanding only what works on average, despite aspirations to reach each individual student (not to mention mounting evidence that “average” itself is a flawed construct)."
Unbundling School Technology Purchases
Forbes Rod Berger
"Interoperability initiatives like Project Unicorn, EdFi Alliance and IMS Global, and suites like Google Education, flexible learning management systems, and LearnPlatform (which allow interaction with and across basically any technology) are evidence of the market’s movement towards targeted purchasing, be it in individual apps or bundles.”
Schools collect reams of data, inspiring a move to make sense of it all
The Hechinger Report Nichole Dobo
"Project Unicorn: The mythical creature is the namesake of this new initiative for good reason...The project is trying to get schools to use their collective buying power to strong-arm ed tech developers into delivering programs that provide interoperability”
Day 2 at SXSWedu 2018
Education Dive Roger Riddell
“Without privacy and security of data, you won’t have interoperability of data,” he said, noting that it would be a "wild west" scenario.
Data should empower teachers to make better decisions and intervene more quickly with students, but the conversation must first be set and grounded in security and privacy.
The Edtech Buying Process Is Broken. ISTE Says Teachers Can Fix It.
EdSurge Emily Tate
The edtech playground is one of a handful of case studies featured in a new edtech buying guide released by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), a non-profit organization, and Project Unicorn, an initiative to improve data interoperability in K-12.
96 Edtech Predictions for K12 in 2019
eSchool News Ellen Ullman
What the industry needs is a place where interoperability can be discussed and advocated without complicated jargon and a standards bias—maybe a “Church of Interoperability” that’s open to all. I see Project Unicorn possibly filling this role. They see the bigger picture and nicely bridge the tech and curriculum sides of the discussion.
District Leaders Seek Interoperability to Access Data Educators Need
EdWeek Market Brief Michele Molnar
About two months ago, ed-tech companies were asked to sign a “vendor pledge” committing that their digital tools and platforms will meet a standard for interoperability. The pledge is the work of Project Unicorn, a group that is a part of Innovate EDU, a New York-based nonprofit focused on closing gaps in student achievement through new learning models and tools.
Project Unicorn signs first companies to help schools handle the hairball of edtech data
GeekWire Frank Catalano
The national project, run by the Brooklyn-based nonprofit InnovateEDU, began in 2017 by getting 26 school districts to agree to its pledge to improve school data interoperability across software programs. Less than a year later, the number of K-12 school systems has ballooned to more than 400 representing some 3.2 million students, and the first-ever edtech companies are also signing the vendor version of the pledge.
The 34 edtech vendors include well-known names, such as McGraw-Hill Education and Cengage Learning, and not-quite-household-brand startups, such as Clever and Newsela.
Data interoperability in K-12: A teacher’s perspective
Michael & Susan Dell Foundation Blog Brett Emerson and Editor
"Data needs to be shared in a thoughtful, responsible way with the students. I believe they will understand their own challenges better if they have access to that data. They’ll understand where and how they can improve. For example, they could see how 15 absences during a nine-week grading period effected their outcomes on assessments and their mastery of content standards. What's this item about? What makes it interesting? Write a catchy description to grab your audience's attention..." Brett Emerson, Shelby County Schools
Tool: Project Unicorn—Making the Mythical Idea of Data Interoperability Real
EdSurge
As schools and districts implement innovative learning systems, they must address issues of data interoperability. Project Unicorn provides a rubric that allows school districts and vendors to evaluate where their efforts and tools are on the journey toward interoperability. It also offers a roadmap to safeguarding student data."
Full benefits of edtech can't be realized until data is interoperable, report finds
edscoop Patience Wait
"The benefits of interoperability are numerous, such as allowing data to “follow” a student transferring from one school system to another, even across state lines, then enabling teachers in the student’s new system to review and understand the student’s earlier work, progress and areas of struggle.
Denver Public Schools in Colorado, not one of the states that participated in the symposium, has been working on interoperability issues. The system signed the Project Unicorn pledge to pursue interoperability; the state of Oregon, a symposium participant, also took the pledge."
Top Education Trend of 2018: Active Learning Spaces
Forbes Tom Vander Ark
The shift from marking time to measuring learning will be generational in length, but our landscape analysis suggests several interesting signs of progress that will be evident in 2019... More demand for interoperability will be evident as a result of efforts like Project Unicorn.
Interoperability Boosts the Speed of School Communications
EdTech Eli Zimmerman
Other initiatives also promote adoption of interoperability. For example, Project Unicorn partners with industry leaders and school systems to develop actionable interoperability solutions and encourage school administrators to take ownership “through informed comparison of vendors.”
School data is messy, but it doesn’t have to be
The Hechinger Report Tara García Mathewson
"Erin Mote says data interoperability will give teachers their Sundays back. One of her nonprofit’s major initiatives, Project Unicorn, aims to help schools claim the power they have as ed tech purchasers. Since last year, 419 districts have signed Project Unicorn’s interoperability pledge, saying, among other things, that they will prioritize data interoperability when deciding which vendors to work with."
Project Unicorn Pushes for Interoperability in Courseware
Center for Digital Education Jeff Dominguez
Formed when Mote’s national group of technologists gathered to identify the core problems in data science and personalized learning, Project Unicorn has worked hard to help people understand that interoperability isn’t a scary thing. “It's actually all over our daily lives,” Mote explains. “Whether you're using an ATM that's not from your bank, and you’re still able to get money out; or when I fly somewhere, not having to go to a Delta TSA agent versus an American Airlines TSA agent; these examples illustrate that interoperability can be so seamless. It's so foundational that it works in the background, and it's kind of magical."
Making student data more usable: What innovation theory tells uS
Christensen Institute Thomas Arnett
Efforts led by the Ed-Fi Alliance, the Access for Learning Community, and the federal government’s Common Education Data Standards program, all aim to promote common sets of data standards. In parallel with their these efforts, promising initiatives like the Project Unicorn pledge encourage school systems to increase demand for interoperability. But common standards, while gaining some traction, still have a ways to go before they become universal.
District Demand Growing for Data and Content Systems That Can Share Information
EdWeek Market Brief Michele Molnar
K-12 districts are starting to understand how important it is to have data interoperability for their digital tools, and to push for this capability. Ed-tech companies are starting to take notice, too. That was one of the key takeaways in a session at EdNET 2017, which focused on “Giving Teachers Back Their Sundays.” With more digital resources than ever in classrooms, there’s a growing awareness among district leaders that these products need to be able to securely share information within schools and in a district.
education week special report: unchaining digital data: k-12 interoperability
Education Week Sean Cavanagh, Benjamin Herold, Holly Yettick Kurtz
“In this report, we look in depth at the hard questions that K-12 district tech leaders need to ask about interoperability. And we detail the experiences of districts that have already begun down that uncertain path.
The report includes a profile of one district’s interoperability journey; tips and mistakes for K-12 administrators to avoid when they pursue data overhauls; and the results of an original survey of the nation’s chief technology officers, breaking down their biggest challenges with interoperability, and the problems they are counting on it to solve.”
edsurge guide:
What Does It Take to Make Interoperability Work in K-12 Education?
EdSurge Marisa Kaplan, Kelly Blair
Interoperability, defined dryly, is the seamless, secure and controlled exchange of data between different applications and technologies. The term is a mouthful, yet the concept enables many conveniences we take for granted….
So what does it take to make interoperability work in education? In 2017, the EdSurge Research team collaborated with Getting Smart to dig into how companies and schools are trying to connect the data pipes. In this guide, you’ll find case studies from the perspective of educators and administrators, as well as a series of profiles that share how companies are thinking, planning and guiding their product development process to address these user needs.
Unicorn Tweets
Check out the latest from our feed.
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The @DigitalPromise Data Ready Playbook is a great resource to help school systems prepare for data interoperabilit… https://t.co/4wIsEtobK3 -
Edleader 4/10 Webinar from @CoSN and @edwebnet at 5 pm ET: Leading and Implementing Educational Technology Innovati… https://t.co/6wKn4Bt6fd
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RT @InnovateEDUNYC: Our students need advocates. In order to be an effective advocate, you need to be equipped with the correct informa… https://t.co/ciNN1ij2Xy
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#K12 schools are using an increasing amount of #edtech software but sometimes make mistakes, which can compromise t… https://t.co/AX5UJhvFt5
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Our students need advocates. In order to be an effective advocate, you need to be equipped with the correct informa… https://t.co/163XJYdalz
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Meet @landingzone_org at the @edfialliance Tech Congress on April 12th at 9:45 am ET for an informative discussion… https://t.co/MyllorOfOA
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The @CoSN K-12 Community Vendor Assessment Tool, or K-12CVAT, is a questionnaire framework designed for K-12 school… https://t.co/3PCfGSHbUy
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RT @getactionaly: Eighty-five percent of #superintendents believe schools should securely share information about a student’s academi… https://t.co/Evr8YoEZgK
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RT @DigitalPromise: Are you an #educator who wants to earn up to $25k building a new #edtech tool that supports learner variability? Ap… https://t.co/5cKzEoXr8Z
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RT @educateall_org: “EALA is committed to spotlighting and drawing attention to equity-driven leadership working to support students wh… https://t.co/DNd9qTw0Aj