Mobile solutions give educators new ways to streamline data management
At emAPP, we design innovative solutions that organizations can use within their existing infrastructures to help solve business challenges. In recent years, we’ve used this approach to help schools manage student information more effectively, which improves school safety and streamlines daily operations.
One of our products is a mobile app called KiDS (Key Information Data Systems). Special education professionals can use KiDS to easily retrieve confidential records of special-needs students. Ensuring data privacy is a key goal of the app, and built-in security protocols limit access to authorized personnel, safeguarding sensitive student information.
While KiDS helps professionals spend less time on information gathering and more time helping students, it also includes a sophisticated document management system built on Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft Azure that offers school districts efficient ways to store, update, and transmit student records.
Our first KiDS customer was the English Montreal School Board (EMSB), which has 4,000 elementary and secondary school students with special needs. One of the district’s records management challenges occurs each summer when elementary schools share graduating students’ files with secondary schools. In the past, this process took two months and involved transferring the records manually. Over the past year, the district began digitizing the records, and by springtime, EMSB reduced the transfer time to three weeks. Over the next few years, EMSB will digitize the remaining records, and future transmissions will be entirely electronic and happen instantaneously.
Another important annual records-transfer task occurs each January. Every year, the special education staff evaluates students to determine whether their disabilities meet the provincial government funding criteria. The district submits an application to update the student’s official coding, which affects the funding that EMSB receives to support the student’s education. This past year, the district submitted 300 applications. Like the summer records transfer, the process of creating and submitting hard copies of all the documents typically takes months, and staff members frequently worked through the holiday break. For the most recent transfer, the staff used KiDS to upload the 300 student files electronically and sent them to the provincial government via USB key.
After the provincial government obligated school boards to submit student files electronically, many organizations were left scrambling to meet the new requirements. However, EMSB was in good shape because we added an enhancement to KiDS that simplified the whole process. Staff members can access a student’s electronic file, choose the necessary documents, click one button, and the proprietary system that we built on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform assembles an application that conforms to all requirements. EMSB saved weeks of effort this year as a result, and the success of the project was recognized by the school board’s Director General. We’re very proud of the role that emAPP played in that success.
Read the full case story here.
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