A growing number of K-12 districts are taking the open source plunge, both to cope with tight budgets and to escape proprietary vendor lock-in and expensive upgrade cycles. With the potential for cost savings and a growing number of educational applications, open source software is proving to be an effective alternative for schools willing to make…

Data integration is one of the single most challenging tasks any district can face. Fortunately for school districts throughout the country with data scattered in disparate systems, an open specification known as the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) is mitigating that challenge. SIF has emerged as a cornerstone of K-12 data warehousing,…

Although a seemingly good idea, electronic portfolios have to date failed to gain significant traction in higher education. Institutions with ePortfolio implementations routinely report high numbers of accounts on their campuses, but few believe that those numbers are a meaningful reflection of actual usage. Change is in the air for the…