Ottawa Catholic School Board partners with Clever for simplified edtech management

For one of the largest Catholic boards in Ontario, automated rostering and single sign-on made it easier to provide access and measure the impact of edtech tools across schools.

The challenge: Manual, isolated processes made it challenging to measure impact

Ottawa Catholic School Board, serving 48,000 students across 89 schools, sought to improve its data integration and analysis processes. Ottawa Catholic developed a purchasing process that connects curriculum and IT teams. It would take two days to create edtech accounts using custom scripts, resulting in students getting delayed access to new applications. It was a challenge for curriculum teams to understand how students and teachers were using online tools. Geoff Edwards, Superintendent of Learning Technologies, knew that easy access and centralized data insights on edtech were critical to successfully supporting schools.

The solution: Automated rostering and SSO in one place simplifies access and edtech management

Ottawa Catholic implemented Clever to save time with automated rostering and one place for edtech analytics.  By having all their edtech integrations in Clever, the board can easily track login usage across their applications. Now, when Ottawa Catholic considers working with a partner, they ask them if they integrate with Clever to automate account creation right from their SIS rather than manual scripts or .CSVs. Teachers also save time getting students logged into devices and accessing applications. The youngest students students simply flash the Clever Badge, a physical passcode that looks like a QR code, in front of the computer camera and they are instantly logged in. Clever Analytics provides the board with live, continuous metrics of students logging into resources, regardless of whether they are on Clever or not.

When we get a new piece of software and they’re integrated with Clever, the integration is much easier. We don’t have nearly as much work to do and we’re sure that the SSO is going to happen as well.

Robert Long

Coordinator, Learning Technologies, Ottawa Catholic School Board

The impact: Ottawa Catholic gains two business days with automation and more data insights to support schools

The Learning Technologies team relies on Clever to support their schools and streamline technology tasks. Automated rostering is simple and easy to use, saving them up to two business days so they can focus on other areas supporting schools. The team also uses insights to make data-informed decisions and better support their 48,000 students.  Plus, access to school-level data makes it even easier to have a data-informed conversation with school leaders. Ottawa’s partnership with Clever provides one central place to manage technology and access data insights that help make the most out of their edtech investments.

It’s important to bring the data to a principal and share how well the school has integrated technology. On the other hand, it’s also important to ask principals what support they need to integrate more technology into classrooms. They might be missing out on a great opportunity when we have data that shows other schools are using it every day.”

Geoff Edwards, Superintendent of Learning Technologies, Ottawa Catholic School Board