This week we talk with Bill Fritz and Kevin Gantos, leaders with deep roots in the edtech world, on what inspired them to start their non profit organization-- Learn 21-- for schools. Contact them at info@learn21.org to learn more.

Transcription:
Zack: On today’s episode I’ll be speaking with two people with deep roots in the edtech world. Here today we’ve got Kevin Gantos...

Kevin: I’m Kevin Gantos. I am the IT Operations Manager for Learn 21.

Zack: And Bill Fritz...

Bill: I’m Bill Fritz. I'm the Director of Technology at Sycamore Community Schools.

Zack: And they are the co-founders of Learn 21 -- a non-profit providing innovative, cost-effective educational technology solutions by educators for educators. So Kevin, tell me a little bit about your background.

Kevin: I’ve been working in edtech for 18 years now and I've worked a variety of jobs within different schools doing data base management and software development. When Bill and I started Learn 21, we started about 12 years ago and as an organization we were really just trying to focus on helping schools manage their IT and it's really just evolved from that original vision over the last 12 years.

Zack: Yeah, so both of you guys, as I understand it, have been a part of the edtech industry for a long time. Bill, can you fill us in on your background as well.

Bill: I’ve been at sycamore since ‘94. I’ve been the Director since roughly in the early 2000’s as well as the Executive Director of Learn 21 along with Kevin. We founded Learn 21 about 12 years ago. Our goal when we were working together-- actually Kevin was on my team at Sycamore-- we recognized the need of a lot of school districts around us with resources of software development, data integration, management and didn’t have those resources so we started working together and collaborating with schools around us to come alongside schools to help them in areas where maybe they didn’t have the resources or the knowledge. My background previously was I was in business software as well and coming into the edtech space and now with Learn 21 we are also the Ohio CoSN chapter, so we have taken on a leadership role trying to be K12 tech director advocates-- mentoring as well as Kevin’s team is really coming alongside schools and providing software solutions for them as well as we have an arm of Learn 21 that actually is supporting online learning, online schools, instructional coaching and content development.

Zack: It seems like you guys are positioned really well to understand what is going on in your schools and also finding out: How can we solve these problems uniquely and quickly? Specifically concentrating on the one to one manager for the data point, can you talk about the specific problems that caused you guys to design this portion of the software?

Bill: Yeah, I’ll just jump in and talk a little bit about-- I think Kevin and I originally -- way even before Learn 21 -- we recognized that a lot of these problems aren't just unique to Sycamore schools or the work we were doing. We recognized that student data dashboard or when we went one to one about 7 years ago we had the same challenges as everyone else. So Zack it was more about-- I’m about to hand devices out and immediately I looked at Kevin's team and I said, “I don’t want to do this on spreadsheets. I want to have a robust enterprise solution. About 10-15 years ago there weren't a lot of enterprise solutions around meaning that interoperability was happening meaning that you've got a piece of software that interacts with other pieces of software moving data back and forth making your life a lot easier. And that's a lot of what we started with at Learn 21 is trying to provide systems of integration and especially around when we went one-to-one. So Kevin’s team worked closely with us at Sycamore and actually engaged four other districts and we worked with the tech directors talking specifically, Zack, about work flows: What are those things that you do to pass them out? What about a student information system? Where are you going to get that data? How are you going to integrate with your Google Admin Console? Or your Microsoft or your Apple devices? And then you're going to collect them at the end of the year and then all of the things in between and that just evolved into a conversation of workflows when we continued to talk to schools and nurtured that conversation. Kevin's team having the development skill on staff, which you don't find that, Zack. I mean you don't even find that with vendor. Vendors pretty much create a solution and then hope or think that it's going to parallel to what you need or complement to what you need always and that's not the case. So Kevin, I don’t know if there's other thoughts you want to share about the work we've been doing with the one-to-one manager and your team specifically?

Kevin: Yeah, I mean a lot for us we always talk as we are talking with schools and as we continue to evolve the system-- it's really around best practices. We listen to schools and what they're doing and how they are trying to accomplish the work they're doing in districts. And as we work with schools around the country we’re learning new and different ways of deploying devices to students and how that works. And for us it's always about listening. It's always about getting that feedback like it was from the beginning. So, we’re always continuing to listen, continuing to learn and our hope is that with our software we’re bringing those best practices. We’re baking them into the software so it’s not just a tool that could kind of do a lot of things but it’s really focused around giving schools the tools with the best practices built in so they can be successful and we find quite often that when the schools come back to us and provide us feedback, their feedback is “This has made our job so much easier. We can’t imagine doing what we are doing today without the one-to-one manager.” So that’s always a great testament for us to hear from our clients.

Zack: Yeah and kind of the back story of how i found you guys originally was my journey in K12 Tech kind of started about 9 years ago working with schools and there was always this question of how do we track from start to finish our devices whether it’s breakages or devices are at end of life and I need to manage that inventory kind of across the board and so about 6 or 5 years ago I started drawing up schematics of what would a standardized process look like for schools start to finish and I couldn't find anything. You find these corporate ones that large businesses use and a lot of schools were trying to make those work but schools have such a specific niche and need that it just wouldn't work so I actually went to a software company to try to get something designed and they just didn’t understand. I think that was the biggest complication with finding a software like this was you go to a software company and they just don’t understand why certain things are so important. Through a couple of different things we had a mutual friend connect us and I started looking through what you guys were doing and it was exactly what we needed for our schools. I think a lot of our competitors they were looking for something that was for them and what I wanted to look for with K12 Tech was something that was school facing. If it was only self serving to me, the schools aren't going to use it. They're not going to care. So i wanted something where it’s intrical to the schools day to day operations so they would be forced to use it and we could help them with the data and analytics. I would say I’ve had meetings with more than 100 school districts and I would say 5 times maybe the schools actually knew what their breakage rate was. Maybe 5 times. And it was an awkward situation. A lot of time for the tech director if the superintendent is there is like we don't even know what our breakages are and people are using Google and using spreadsheets to track all of that and what you guys have done to kind of solve that problem has been great. I guess for you guys specifically, can you talk a little bit about what information you’re able to pull from your system that is integral to schools? What kind of reports, what kind of information incidents and stuff like that, that helps schools truly manage their devices?

Kevin: Sure, so I would say to kind of start out like you said working in schools and with my background I'm always very student centric and student first is my approach. So our system first and foremost works to integrate with the district student information system. You know there's a lot of systems out there that are very device focused. So they'll just say, “Hey, load up all your assets.” It becomes a help desk or just a strict asset management system. For us, we go student-first. So we’re bringing in data from the student information system. So when you go to a sign in device you actually can see information. You can see the student name, their grade level, their building assignments,\ and even student photos. So we are bringing all of that in and then the second piece is we work to integrate with as many mobile device management type systems as possible. So we are bringing in Google chromebooks directly from the Google Admin Console. We are working to bring in Apple devices from solutions like Jamf, Windows devices from systems like Intune and for districts that are still working from spreadsheets right now we still have that ability to import that data as well. And then once we have all of that, that's where we try to remove the data management side of it from the day to day operations so operationally now you can go in and assign a device to a student because all of that information is already there. When a student damages or breaks a device you can actually create an incident and there's workflows and processes for that all while we’re capturing: What type of issues do they have?...