Leadership Matters December 2013

includes mandated state reporting and popular educational applications. Technology in the classroom

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districts in Bloomington, Dekalb, Murphysboro, Belleville and Niles to build cloud infrastructure. Other than a nominal annual membership fee that ranges from $500 to $1,500 based on student enrollment, districts pay only for the IlliniCloud services they use. Those services include:  Massive scalable computing resources using data centers across the state;  Enterprise-level storage solutions like File Blimp, a service that facilitates connecting every student with their files and gives them the ability to share files in a school-controlled environment;  Disaster recovery backup, the

Identity as a Service was built to make it easier for teachers and students to use the ever-growing list of cloud and district-based applications using one login and password, and allowing those applications to understand the role of that person in their district. This allows districts to securely connect their own districts logins using the identity service to nearly any educational application that exists. “This is very powerful in my own district. We have 32 web-based applications, from online assessments like NWEA’s MAP, to instructional applications like

Pearson SuccessNet, and content providers like Discovery Education. Each of these has its own login,” Peterson said. “The identity project also demonstrated the great collaboration between our friends at the University of Illinois, who helped us not only build and test it, but to make sure it was affordable for all districts. Higher education has been doing identity for years and, coincidentally, the

“We want to provide services to school administrators that can get them out of the business of technology infrastructure so that they can focus on teachers and kids...We want to deliver

importance of which again was illustrated in November by the devastating tornadoes that struck several communities in the state;  Infrastructure as a Service, including for applications like transportation, food

information to teachers that they can use with individual students in the classroom. That’s where achievement happens.”

service and student information -- services that might otherwise cost $6,000 to $10,000 apiece, but can be obtained for as much as a 60 percent savings through IlliniCloud; and  Software as a Service, including lecture capture and online meeting services, a tool that enhances professional development opportunities. In addition to saving money, Peterson said IlliniCloud also can help provide some peace of mind for school administrators and parents. For example, regarding the ability for students to share files, Peterson said that is monitored and controlled by school administrators much the same way as they control students’ use of school lockers. Recently, IlliniCloud has been focused on expanding several key services like data, identity and portal. Data as a Service came from demands around data automation and validation and is designed to help ease the data burden facing school administrators. The initiative not only addresses data between a district’s own internal systems, but also

—Jim Peterson, the technology director for Bloomington District 87, who doubles as the chief technology officer for IlliniCloud

U of I is where the core technologies we use were developed. We are very fortunate they were able to extend their expertise to K12.” The third initiative, portal, is the result of IlliniCloud’s collaboration with the U of I’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Northern Illinois University and Southern Illinois University. It is focused on a portal of applications that are built among Illinois partners and allow other vendors to easily integrate. “This presentation layer is simply a standard- based approach for delivering a common look and feel for applications, apps that can use identity and data that districts may elect to provide. In a way, it’s much like the iTunes app store, but it’s being built in a way that understands data around the user to make it more meaningful to them and stays within the K12 cooperative,” Peterson explained.

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