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tech in the classroom

TechCHAT: Ray Ackerlund

The TechCHAT series invites teachers, media specialists and other educators from across the country and around the world to share how they’re using technology to enhance instruction and student learning. Contact us about sharing your classroom tech ideas and lessons learned.

ray ackerlund skyward software schools

Ray Ackerlund is Vice President of Marketing & Product Management for Skyward, Inc. The company's administrative software, designed for K-12 school districts, serves more than 5 million students and 1,700 school districts worldwide. Skyward was featured at the 2014 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference.
 

Skyward handles scheduling, communication, grading and just about everything else an educator has to deal with. How can such an expansive system work synergistically? 

We have found that managing everything related to student information in one system improves performance, as we are able to develop workflows to share data more efficiently. It is difficult to do this when relying on interfacing multiple independent applications. Additionally, a single system provides greater controls for security and student privacy while offering a single portal for educators. We also developed our solution to handle scalability that includes districts with more than 70,000 students, and state deployments serving more than 1 million students.


What industry trends have helped improve the functionality of your software?

This is a very exciting time for education. The growth in technology and the personalization of the education process gets students more engaged, creating a more impactful environment. We recently rolled out a number of new tools, such as our Course Learning Center that allows students to collaborate and receive and submit content electronically. We also recently released our myDistrict360 dashboard that provides an interactive data analytics toolkit for educators. Based on customer focus groups and our own industry research, we have a number of new developments coming in the next year that will support these initiatives even further. 


How accessible is your software, and how much training goes into the implementation process? 

The importance that implementation plays in the success of a district is often overlooked during the deployment of a new system. We place a high importance on this area, and developed an approach called SmartStart that includes a professionally trained project manager who coordinates the entire process. We see three core elements to a successful implementation:

  1. Identifying district benchmarks to quantify a successful implementation and solid return-on-investment, and establishing milestones to reach those goals.
  2. Developing a district-specific migration plan to transfer all essential data, which will support immediate data analysis and reporting to be handled by a dedicated Skyward conversion engineer to ensure optimal accuracy and timeliness.
  3. Establishing a hands-on, in-district training program that dramatically reduces the stress of implementing a new solution, and helps staff feel confident the solution will be a useful tool.


Which standards and grade books have been integrated into the software? Are they universal or district-specific? 

Skyward’s Student Management Suite includes a powerful gradebook solution that is customizable for traditional or standards-based grading approaches. As an integrated component of managing student data today, the integrated gradebook is a key reason districts choose our solution.

Districts that choose to implement our gradebook have immediate access to their standards of choice, whether Common Core, state-defined standards or district-defined standards, and can easily be imported in standard formats. 

Beyond the gradebook, we also allow standards within the system to be applied to multiple areas, including our curriculum mapping tools and courses in the scheduling system. This allows districts to effectively manage and analyze student progress from multiple viewpoints.


What is parents' role within the Skyward system? 

We see parents as one of the most crucial members of the education team, which is why we continually expand our Family Access portal to provide as much information as possible to parents. Their involvement makes a major impact on student performance.

Recently, we released our newest version of Family Access that mirrors common social media approaches to appeal to parents even further. This new format has increased interaction between parents and educators, creating even more engaged parents


Explain how the Skylert feature enhances school safety. 

The growth of education technology has also increased the volume and complexity of communication options. As it relates to general communication, we have focused on centralizing that interaction through our Family Access portal. We also recognized the importance of urgent communication needs. Our Skylert application offers the scalability to handle these unique situations with the reliability and accessibility to immediately initiate and disperse the message via voice or text message. Beyond urgent messages, Skylert also offers numerous messaging options for other needs as defined by each district. 

 

Article by Jason Cunningham, EducationWorld Social Media Editor
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