October 23, 2011 at 6:43 pm | Announcement, News | No comment
Novachi today releases an upgrade to the system with new enhancements and maintenance fixes. All online users are automatically upgraded to the latest version of the software. There should be no impact to any existing user data. Today’s release includes the following:
Performance fixes – This release includes performance fixes for school administrative pages and other areas.
Maintenance fixes – This release includes some high priority fixes as reported by our users. In particular, we have resolved some critical page navigation issues that were reported.
For questions or to report an issue with the upgrade, contact Novachi Support by email at support@novachi.org or submit a ticket at http://www1.novachi.com/support/.
October 11, 2011 at 12:00 pm | News | No comment
According to a recent report, thirty-seven states have cut education funding this year alone. For many of these states, these cuts are not unprecedented, but a continuing trend that has wreaked havoc on the education systems that depend on those dollars. While state budgets shrink, it becomes increasingly necessary for the private sector to bring innovation to an industry that is need of answers.
In California alone, funding per student has been cut twenty percent since 2008. Similarly, Arizona, Hawaii, and South Carolina have all seen similar increments in their budget cuts. With no relief in sight, many states worry about the status of their education systems, as local education jobs decreased by 115,000 between September 2010 and September 2011.
These budget cuts come at an extremely difficult time for America’s education system. Many international government’s education agencies are moving to adopt a completely digital curriculum over the next four years. Many American schools are being left behind, and while the student population grows more and more every year, our education budget seems to steadily shrink.
Much of the $100 billion in stimulus money that was provided by the federal government was intended for use in conjunction with the No Child Left Behind Act, a movement intended to bring more transparency to education and bring a greater level of technological involvement in the way we approach education.
Technologists all over the world have been attempting to find a resolution to address the problem of schools with low-budgets, yet a high need for technology access. In a recent story by CBR, it was announced that a company in India had been developing a touch screen tablet designed especially for students in areas where such technologies are cost-prohibitive. The tablet, which is priced at $60 for the public and $35 for students and schools, offers education agencies a cost-effective alternative to the current line of tablet products, and the perfect medium to host next-generation digital information systems like SIS and LMS.
This tablet, paired up with cloud-based Student Information and Learning Management System provider Novachi, could potentially provide schools both here in the United States, and all over the world with the tools to bring their curriculum into the digital spectrum long before current forecasts indicate is possible.
October 6, 2011 at 2:42 pm | News | No comment
The California Education Technology Professionals Association’s (CETPA) annual conference is coming to Long Beach November 8th, 2011. Novachi will be on the scene to share its free technology with California’s education professionals at booth #137. In addition to the exhibition space, Novachi representative Jon Nemeth has been invited as a guest speaker. Mr. Nemeth will be speaking on Tuesday, Novemeber 8th, on the subject of “CALPADS Data Generation and Validation”.
CALPADS is California’s Longitudinal Data System, a data warehouse that stores student achievement data via a secure SSID number. CALPADS was created in part to expand upon the limitations of California’s previous data warehouse system and also to comply with Federal NCLB (No Child Left Behind) standards.
Mr. Nemeth will be speaking on the subject of CALPADS as it has become integral to the way LEAs (Local Education Agencies) monitor and store student achievement data. Unfortunately, as CALPADS is still a relatively new system undergoing continuous development, many education and IT professionals are still unclear on its use, and uninformed on the most effective ways to report their school data.
Novachi provides an elegant solution to some of the problems that arise in most LEAs use of CALPADS. Instead of requiring school and district administrators to manually manage individual student and faculty records, Novachi’s all-in-one solution collects the appropriate data throughout the term. At the end of each term, district administrators need only press a button to have their student and faculty data exported to a CALPADS ready format. Furthermore, Novachi validates all of this data in real-time, preventing the need to migrate the data back and forth for validation purposes.
To learn more about CALPADS data management and validation, check out Mr. Nemeth’s presentation on Friday, October 11th, 2011, at the Long Beach Convention Center. For all other inquiries regarding Novachi and it’s free suite of tools, locate a Novachi representative at booth #137 on the 8th-11th of November.
