This document analyses three tools that are used to assess the current level of internet connectivity available within schools. It presents a detailed description of each tool, including its strengths and weaknesses followed by observations based on measured data, and finally, conclusions.
This “one-stop” resource for education stakeholders provides information about data privacy, confidentiality and security practices related to student data.
The nonprofit organization Creative Commons (CC) addresses the legal issues of making content on the internet open so that people can use it as they wish for education, research and other purposes. The organization offers a spectrum of six intellectual property licenses that can be applied to content available on the internet by the person who created it. These licenses range from the most restrictive—people can download a creator’s work and share it with others, but they can’t change it in any way or use it commercially—to the least restrictive: Others can distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as they credit the creator. The latter is called an Attribution or CC BY license. CC’s intellectual property licenses are valid in the US and five other jurisdictions where they’ve been tested in courtrooms.
Open Professionals Education Network (OPEN) provides links to OER as well as guidance on how to handle licensing requirements for education-oriented digital materials
Developed by the non-profit organization Achieve, these rubrics were created to evaluate open educational resources, but they can be applicable to any content.
Comprised of 15 school districts, NEFEC focuses on helping member districts cooperatively meet their educational goals and objectives by providing programs and services that individual districts would not be able to provide as effectively or as economically when acting alone. NEFEC hosts an Instructional Technology program to provide network infrastructure guidance, computer systems technical support, and technology in-service training to our NEFEC member districts.
The IlliniCloud is a cooperative of Illinois school districts in Illinois providing cloud services specifically for K12 via three shared data centers in our state. This is a K12 for K12 developed cooperative but with partners from Higher Ed and contracted services for development of certain services. This cooperative helps to provide state of the art computing storage and network resources to all districts regardless of size therefore minimizing the number of servers and network tools that local IT departments are required to manage and support.
This article explains how the Kentucky Department of Education moved 173 districts to cloud based services to help increase the reliability and capabilities for school districts and take workload off of IT staff.
