Acumen Solutions announced today the limited availability of SchoolForce™, an enterprise class, open Student Information System (SIS) and performance management solution. This cloud computing based application is built on the salesforce.com® Force.com® platform and integrated with Google (News - Alert) Apps. SchoolForce allows schools and school districts to have open access to the source code of the SchoolForce application with the ability to enhance and extend it. SchoolForce is being distributed free of charge* to a limited number of schools and districts in its first release and will then be available via download later this year to all K-12 schools and school districts. Large urban school districts and charter organizations have been the initial focus in this limited release.
"This is a game changer in K-12 technology. For the first time schools and districts can access state-of-the-art technology, greatly enhancing our productivity while saving us time and money," said Jennie Niles, Founder and Head of School, E. L. Haynes Public Charter School. "After helping us review all the existing systems out there and coming up empty, Acumen Solutions offered to develop a system that would solve all of our problems and provide us with a tool upon which we could continually innovate. As far as I'm concerned, SchoolForce is a miracle." Niles added, "With SchoolForce's open platform and approach, schools can own their data and will no longer be at the mercy of closed systems from traditional software vendors."
E.L. Haynes Public Charter School is a recognized thought leader in education reform and one of the recipients of the Race to the Top funding. Leaders from the school advised Acumen Solutions on education industry best practices and provided the educational design requirements for most modules. E.L. Haynes is using all available modules of the SchoolForce solution. A large urban school district has also purchased a Reading Assessment module from Acumen Solutions and they are in the process of implementing this solution to track and analyze student reading performance.
What is SchoolForce™?
SchoolForce is an enterprise class, K-12 Student Information System (SIS) and performance management solution built on the salesforce.com® Force.com® platform and integrated with Google Apps. The solution is built upon open standards and is delivered via the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) model, with a soon to be delivered marketplace of education applications that can be deployed on-demand for each customer. The solution includes core Student Information System (SIS) modules such as: attendance, behavior, homework, student records and a Common Core compatible grade book as well as collaboration and document management - all of which can all be shared with parents and students via a web portal. SchoolForce represents a significat technology shift for measurement and tracking of K-12 students, teachers and school performance by leveraging state of the art cloud computing technology from salesforce.com and Google and combining it with a robust cloud-based data warehouse and analytics tool.
The solution requires the school or district to have a salesforce.com subscription, but the customized applications built for schools are free. Acumen Solutions is encouraging all SchoolForce users to share any code they develop as an extension of the core solution with others in the K-12 community.
