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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
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
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
includes mandated state reporting and
popular educational applications.
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
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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(Continued on page 8)
“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
information to teachers that
they can use with individual
students in the classroom.
That’s where achievement happens.”
—Jim Peterson, the technology director for
Bloomington District 87, who doubles as the
chief technology officer for IlliniCloud
Technology in the classroom
