How This Technologist Uses One Year of Ed Tech Budget to Pay for Three

Park County School District #6 in Cody, Wyoming, is a small, rural district. We don’t have a lot of resources, so we have to be creative to find the best solutions to serve our students and community. When I was hired as the director of instructional technology, I was tasked with finding a way to put all of the district’s important teaching, learning, and compliance data in one place. That place had to be safe and secure, and it had to be easy for everyone to access.

Our district wanted our student information, assessments, curriculum, dashboards, and standards—everything that supports teaching and learning—in a single, simple system. We didn’t want another compliance tool; we wanted a teaching and learning system that everyone wanted to use, that everyone could use, not something that everyone had to use. The more I looked, the more I realized that what I was searching for didn’t yet exist in K-12 education, and I couldn’t find anything that had “everything” our district needed.

I found several “integration tools,” but these tools just sat on top of several disparate systems—systems we still had to pay for―and added another layer and another cost to make the systems “talk” to each other. As a smaller district, we didn’t have the resources to pay for or manage multiple separate systems. We needed to consolidate software packages, not add more into the mix.

As I talked with users throughout our district, we determined that we needed the freedom to customize our new system to individualize instruction and to engage our community and our parents. I also knew that whatever tool we picked, it had to meet state reporting requirements. Basically, I was looking for the “Holy Grail” of education technology, but I believed that if I looked hard enough and was willing to try a little different approach, I could find it.

Finally, I heard about a small company—MIDAS Education—that had developed something I had to see. I’ve tried a lot of products, and they don’t always work. So now, I always approach any new product, especially one that makes big promises, with a little skepticism.

The folks at MIDAS were talking about a concept called education enterprise management (EEM). EEM is the idea that teachers, administrators, parents, students, and other stakeholders who need information can securely get what they need to see when they need to see it and access it how they want to access it. EEM sounded just like what I was looking for. It’s the solution to the ed tech problem that so few systems “talk” to each other and that teachers are asked to use so many of these systems—all with different user interfaces and multiple log-ins. As a result, teachers actually use only the one or two systems that we require them to use for compliance.

We evaluated systems from existing industry leaders for SIS, LMS, CMS, and other acronyms, but found each slightly lacking. Each required us to integrate other vendors and partners either manually or via LTI or API. The ability to work with a company, as opposed to trying to adapt our needs to their products, was key. As a small district, we just don’t have the resources to change our workflows, training and re-training our staff. Nor do we have the manpower or financial resources to pay staff, contractors, or vendors to rewrite software.

So we piloted MIDAS’s system for a year. It was completely configurable; we were able to work with them to customize their software to our needs, placing all of our data in one Amazon Web Services database. We are excited about our future and the opportunity to explore a new way of individualizing instruction by using technology while keeping the teacher and the student front and center.