Free Systems Aren’t Integrated with District Resources and Systems
Free systems are typically not integrated with the school or district main student information system (SIS), the identity management system that controls logins across multiple applications (e.g. Microsoft’s Active Directory), or any attendance database, report card system or resource scheduling system. Sometimes there’s no data sharing of assessment results into your online grade book. It’s hard to connect to systems like this and do it in an elegant way, so very few free tools do.
Free Systems Often Push the Administration Burden to Teachers
Because they are not connected to district systems, free sites typically have no knowledge of which students are in a given class or school. This means teachers are often left with the challenge of inputting students and classes for a grade book or student rewards system, for instance, and removing and adding students as they come and go. When it comes to parent communication, some teachers take on the burden of running their own email lists, managing updates themselves as parents and their email addresses change. Some technically advanced teachers even attempt websites for individual classes and resource sharing. This opt-in nature also fosters inequity across the school or district. Students with the keen teachers will get access to the free tools, but other students are left out. Often, teachers in the highest-need schools are already overwhelmed and are unable to manage the additional workload. When you add up the number of hours it takes for teachers and administrators to manage “free” systems, they suddenly don’t seem so free.
What’s Free Today Might Not Be Free in the Future– or May Even Be GONE!
How can you budget to maybe have to pay at some point for a tool you count on using today for free? What if there’s no money in your budget the year the vendor decides to start charging? What do you do? Stop using the system? The freemium model is not working for everyone. Many companies that are giving their software away— and their investors—are waking up to the fact that freemium is great when it works, but it doesn’t actually work all that often. If a vendor doesn’t find some way to make money, no matter how much capital they’ve raised,their funding will dry up and they’re going to end up out of business. In other words, even the most well funded companies need to crack the revenue code, and not all will. And that’s going to lead to even bigger headaches for schools that will cost even more to fix. Companies need revenue to continue development and to support existing installations, i.e. to survive.
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You May Find Yourself Paying an Unexpected Price
Users of social media like Facebook have been learning the old saw,if you’re not paying for a product or service, you’re the product. While there are guidelines in education in many countries worldwide aimed at protecting student data, even big companies like Google, that should know better, are making mistakes. Now, if Google can mess up, how many other companies may run afoul of legislation intended to protect data in education as they try to monetize teacher and student information because that’s their only path to revenue? At some point free solutions can suddenly come at an unexpected cost. That cost may be through licensing fees, fees for upgrades, or service fees. Perhaps it may be through advertising you may not want. Or perhaps that cost comes in the form of lost data when a company goes away because it couldn’t stay in business and refused to give you a way to export your data. District IT personnel sometimes get involved, but not always for the reasons you might think. IT professionals are increasingly being called on to police teachers’ applications so as to mitigate school districts’ legal exposure. How many well-meaning teachers understand the potential for litigation for accidentally sharing a student’s academic information with someone they thought was a parent or guardian? Or maybe who was a parent at one time, but isn’t any longer after a court ruling? Teachers shouldn’t be expected to shoulder the added burden of knowing about and managing critical information that the office or district is already managing. It’s only smart for educators to look carefully before tying themselves to free or freemium services. Schools and boards will forego free software for the right software. For instance, 29 New York City schools opted out of a free Department of Education-developed data management system in favor of a private one. And users of free systems move over to our commercial social learning and education engagement system, Edsby, all the time. The take away here is clear. “Free” solutions can often cost your school or district real time, real money and real results. When looking for future systems, place special emphasis on platforms that integrate with your district-wide legacy applications so that teachers aren’t shouldering the burden of data entry. And last but not least, plan for properly managed school-wide rollouts to ensure that the students and teachers who need the most help and support get the benefits of modern tools. Scott Welch is co-founder of Edsby, a commercial all-in-one application for K-12 school districts that offers attendance, lesson planning, social learning, grade books, parent engagement and more. For more information, visit www.edsby.com. SouthEast Education Network v FALL 2014
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