District Administration - January 2012 - (Page 72)

cio Management CONtINUED District after figuring out one password. “The simpler it is, the less secure it is,” he says. Student Instruction IAM programs’ simplification of online access to resources for teachers can lead to maximizing their use for student instruction, says Sandeep Chellani, executive director of product development for the New York City Public Schools. “If you had to go into your iPhone and sign in with a username and password each time you used an app, that would be a hassle and you would tend to use fewer ones,” he says. Although it’s not possible to draw a definitive connection between increased student achievement and IAM implementation in New York City, Chellani Online Identity At one time, 70 percent of the service calls to the help desk were about lost passwords, Khazei says. Since implementing this self-service IAM model, the district has been able to reduce its help desk staff by 30 to 40 percent, which has been crucial in the current climate of budget cuts. “Our primary job is to make life easier for teachers,” says Khazei. Single Sign-On Single sign-on access management, which requires users to remember just one password and allows them to log in just once a day, is quickly becoming the aimed-for standard for access management, according to several technology directors. Karcher says achieving such transparency for users requires some complicated dealings “under the hood,” however. One issue the district faces is the lack of interoperability between Microsoft’s offerings and the district’s other resources. Since Microsoft only supports single sign-on across its own products, Karcher and her team have to maintain several software tools that facilitate communication between Microsoft’s products and those from other vendors, which she says is all worth it in order to provide users with a seamless experience. Chris Squatritto, director of technical resources for Nevada’s Clark County School District, is not as convinced as others that single sign-on is the best answer. His district, which is poised to begin a pilot IAM program this month, offers its own centralized sign-on system that requires a two-factor authentication, such as a fingerprint and the answer to a security question. Squatritto calls single sign-on “an older way of thinking.” For example, someone can hack into a computer and be able to access a bank account and health records “We take pride in closely monitoring and maintaining accurate student records, which requires parents’ names and enrollments, to identify and assign each with a unique ID number. ” —Shahryar Khazei, deputy CIO, Los Angeles Unified School District points to the district’s iLearn program, which provides online curricula to schools through 14 different resources. Before IAM, it was more difficult to use, dealing with each individual provider, logging in separately and dealing with forgotten passwords. Now that those resources are easier to access online through a single gateway, they’re much more likely to be used. Keeping Track of Students, Teachers In large school districts with high student mobility rates, monitoring students and tracking them from one school to the next can be an overwhelming task without the aid of an IAM program. Districts such as LAUSD, Miami-Dade and Clark County, which all have high poverty and mobility rates, say it is especially important for English-language learners, special -education students and others with special needs to have accurate records from their first day in class so they don’t lose instructional time in taking redundant placement tests or waiting for administrators to track down personal information. LAUSD has a high rate of transiency due in part to a large number of migrant agricultural workers. Moreover, 70 to 80 different languages are represented in its student body. Khazei says managing students’ identification is more complicated than managing teacher identification, because children’s Social Security numbers are not available. “We take pride in closely monitoring and maintaining accurate student records, which requires collecting a deeper level of information, such as both parents’ names, previous school enrollments, and so forth to identify and assign each with a unique ID number,” Khazei says. The same is true for Miami-Dade, Karcher reports, where the student mobility rate is between 30 and 40 percent. Besides monitoring students, part of the impetus for Clark County’s IAM program was to keep up with the high rate of new teacher hires, which were between 2,000 and 3,000 a year between 1990 and 2007 when the district was undergoing peak growth. Although its hiring process is still manual, the district looks forward to automating new employee systems as part of its upcoming IAM implementation, says Jhone Ebert, the district’s chief technology officer. Working With Vendors Because IAM in the K12 environment is still in its infancy, technology directors are finding that vendors are often uninformed or not qualified to meet their needs. NCEdCloud’s Sammie Carter, for instance, says that “only a handful” of vendors were qualified to provide solutions on a scale adequate to meet the needs of the 3 million users NCEdCloud expects to first sign on with its IAM NCEdCloud initiative in the 2012-2013 72 January 2012 District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - January 2012

District Administration - January 2012
Contents
Letters
News Update
Conversations
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Finding the Perfect Fit
Kansas City Plots Next Steps
Seeking Savings in Special Ed
K12 Guide to Audio/Visual Solutions
Equipping Teachers to Infuse Technology
Flipped Classrooms Gaining Ground
Buying in Bulk
Online Identity Management
Going Mobile
Student Counsel
Online Edge
New Books
New Products
Product Focus
Professional Opinion

District Administration - January 2012