Located in Los Angeles County of California, the Duarte Unified School District (USD) serves the educational needs of 3,400 scholars at the elementary, K-8, and high school levels. The district-wide vision is to produce 21st Century Scholars by providing students with the knowledge, skills, and inspiration to be successful in college, career, and life. Because technology is one of those critical skills and a powerful learning tool, Duarte USD already had in place a robust one-to-one computing program for all students in grades K-12.
The Story
Taking Education Online
When the COVID-19 outbreak hit, it forced a new and unexpected learn-from-home environment. Like all school systems, Duarte Unified School District had to make quick decisions about what constitutes effective and efficient web usage.
As Duarte students and teachers transitioned to distance learning, Duarte’s IT team were busy figuring out which applications would be needed, and in what priority, amongst the seemingly countless options. For insight into overall device usage, which applications were being used, how often, and for how long, Duarte USD turned to Absolute.
Security Needs
3400 Students
Protected
CIPA Compliant
Protection
Safe Remote
Learning Environments
"Given the complexity of the situation, our goal was to make sure all of our students had access not only to devices, but also connectivity to teachers, and access to online curriculum – not only for academics, but also to support social and emotional connections."
ERIC RAMOS
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
DUARTE USD
The Solutions
How They Did It
Distance Learning Program for All Grade Levels and Families
Fortunately, Duarte scholars in grades 6-12 already had Chromebook™ devices through the district’s one-to-one program, and IT could track and manage them remotely using Absolute Control, which is part of the company’s Secure Endpoint product suite. To fully stand up their distance learning program, Ramos and his small IT team had to quickly get devices into the hands of K-5 scholars while also providing Wi-Fi hot spots to district families who didn’t have connectivity.
Insights into Device and Web Application Usage
For insight into overall device usage, what online applications are being used, how often, and for how long, Duarte USD turned to Absolute Web Application Usage reporting capabilities. With Absolute Web Application Usage reporting in place, Duarte’s IT leadership can measure how engaged their scholars are with the online curriculum. The reporting also provides detailed insights for Duarte to navigate better learning outcomes by identifying valuable or underused learning resources to build future budgetary plans. The report also highlights risky websites with potential Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) compliance violations, ensuring Duarte school administrators can protect the safety of their students online by fine-tuning their Web filtering policies.
The Results of Informed Technology Investments
With weekly usage reports, Duarte can now see what apps and Web content scholars are focused on, not simply the websites they have open. Administrators also have visibility into how often and for how long the online learning tools are actually used. These insights have proved invaluable for avoiding freemium software offers that would negatively impact the budget later and optimizing the overall technology program by addressing underutilized online applications.
The Results
Transitioning to Distanced Learning
With Absolute in place, the district has gained a clearer picture of device security and application ROI and saves the IT team time without having to sift through tedious web filter data. Absolute and Duarte District have worked together to support scholars, teachers, and administrators to transition to distanced learning.
For the Duarte USD team, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Helps Duarte USD identify valuable or underused learning resources to build future budgetary plans with reporting capabilities of Absolute Web Application Usage
- Allows the school system to address risky sites that get past the school district’s Web filter
- Enables Duarte USD to better measure return on investment for online applications based on usage
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
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