Caddo Parish Public Schools

Caddo Parish Public Schools, a district serving 35,000 students across diverse rural and urban areas, faced significant challenges when it came to establishing a budget for digital resources and efficiently managing user accounts. These challenges impeded the district’s efforts to provide a seamless digital learning experience for students. 

With ClassLink, they optimized their ability to track the use of digital resources, saved valuable time on manual account maintenance, and ensured that students were connected to the correct resources.

Challenge

With a lack of visibility into software usage, Caddo Parish Public Schools struggled to allocate financial resources effectively for their digital resources. Teacher Technologist Rebekah Gibbs noted that in the transition to remote learning during COVID-19, resources were purchased without a strategy, saying if “somebody said they wanted [an app], we just heard about it and bought it.”  The absence of data-driven insights hindered informed decision-making.

Additionally, managing user accounts across a large student population was time-consuming. The district’s IT team spent significant hours provisioning accounts and troubleshooting access issues. This hindered the team’s ability to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Solution

By integrating ClassLink Analytics, the district gained access to comprehensive data on software usage and user engagement. Supervisor of Educational Technology Justin Steele noted, "ClassLink Analytics provided a lot of insight as we clearly had to examine the return on investment [for apps].” This data allowed them to make informed decisions by identifying which resources were underutilized, enabling them to reallocate funds to tools with higher engagement rates and positive learning outcomes. 

ClassLink OneSync was implemented to streamline user account management. Steele mentioned that “it has saved an immense amount of time for our account maintenance and account syncing between various platforms like our Active Directory system into the Google system.” The solution automated the provisioning and syncing of accounts, ensuring that students and staff had immediate access to the necessary digital resources.

Results

With data-driven insights from ClassLink Analytics, the district optimized its digital resource budget allocation, enhancing the quality of the tools available to students and educators. Gibbs explains, “Now we’re able to hone in on how people are  actually signing in to educational resources because if they’re not signing on through ClassLink, then we can cut that out of our budget.”

ClassLink OneSync significantly reduced the time and effort required for account provisioning and management. Automated account management also ensured that “the right students [and staff] received the right tools.”

Caddo Parish Public Schools successfully overcame the challenges of budget allocation and account management by leveraging ClassLink tools. Through these solutions, the district improved the efficiency of resource allocation, saved time and resources on manual account management, and enhanced the digital learning experience for its diverse student population.