CASE STUDY –School Passport Data Exchange
The Alachua County Public Schools located in Gainesville, Florida serves approximately 30,000 students in 64 schools. It is among the top performing school districts in the state of Florida.
The Challenge
Alachua County was looking for an enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) solution to manage application deployment and access with their 64 locations district-wide. They wanted a solution that would protect the privacy of their students and staff while verifying identity and reducing the costs to deploy new applications.
The Solution
Alachua County Public Schools chose Global Grid for Learning’s (GG4L) School Passport to manage access to K-12 educational applications throughout the district. School Passport is a data exchange platform which provides users with Single Sign-On (SSO) access to a wide variety of educational resources and content. These applications are accessed using a number of supported internet browsers. Users are granted access to by providing credentials that are authenticated outside School Passport, by active directory, Google Classroom, and others. School Passport then presents the user with icons that connect to the EdTech resources to which he or she is allowed access to.
Anyone in the district can connect into School Passport and access any EdTech application they need access to, thus eliminating a secondary sign on with multiple passwords. This also allows for secure data exchange with EdTech vendors, protecting the PII data for the entire district with School Passport’s unique PII Shield.
The Results
With students, teachers, administrators and parents logging in, it is easy to see that the acceptance of School Passport has been widespread in Alachua County Public Schools. Jeannie Fox, Alachua County’s IT system support analyst said, “The broad use of educational technology in our classrooms would not be possible without the help from School Passport.”
Of course, tracking and using digital content and resources is a must in order to insure that the school system is getting value from its investment in educational technology. Along with School Passport comes an analytics dashboard that allows key staff members to look into the “who, what, where and when” of SSO access from browser based applications.
With the nearly 1.5 million times that these digital content and resources were used in a single school year, having the ability to drill into this usage from a variety of perspectives becomes increasingly critical. This dashboard allows the user analyze a very broad or specific data report. It can be filtered by a variety of combinations of options including school(s), application(s), date range and time of day.
“School Passport’s dashboard allows us to gauge the level of usage for each EdTech product by location over differing periods of time. This provides relevant data for decision making as we consider purchasing and renewal of online resources,” added Jeannie Fox.
Learn more about GG4L’s School Passport, a zero-trust data exchange platform.
