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2020

A4L Quarterly Newsletter, September 2020

Being a non-profit organization made up of hundreds of volunteers – both end users and marketplace providers – the “let’s get back to school” focus has provided some interesting informal research data points: We look at educational technology differently,  We look at teachers differently, We look at marketplace providers differently, We look at learning differently.

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The Latest Unity Specification Release Supports ‘Future-Proofing’ EcoSystems

-The Access 4 Learning ® (A4L) Community, more than 3,000 members strong, is proud to announce the latest release of the new Unity Specification which provides standardization of learning data, ranging from everything from classroom rostering to federal data reporting, while addressing privacy issues throughout the education data continuum.

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‘New’ Unity Specification release supports implementation of CEDS and State Reporting

-The Access 4 Learning® (A4L) Community, previously the SIF®  Association, is proud to announce the latest release  of the ‘new’ Unity Specification which provides EDFacts and xPress Roster mappings to address school needs and build towards allowing states and vendors to implement the US Department of Education’s Common Education Data Standards (CEDS).

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The Student Data Privacy Consortium announces the release of the National Data Privacy Agreement

The Student Data Privacy Consortium (SDPC), a special interest group of the non-profit Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community, is proud to announce the release of the first National Data Privacy Agreement (NDPA) to streamline application contracting and set common expectations between schools/districts and marketplace providers.

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A4L Quarterly Newsletter, June 2020

Albert Einstein famously stated, “In the midst of every difficulty lies opportunity.”  While I am quite sure he did not intend this for a global pandemic, this restricted time has given many individuals, families and even organizations time to review ‘how they work’.  Recently, the North American Management Board of the Association held conversations around how to communicate our collective work more effectively, addressing the realities of interoperability and privacy.

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A4L Community delighted to welcome New Zealand and publish the inaugural SIF Specification (NZ)

The Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community is delighted to announce New Zealand as our newest global community member.  The official recognition of this new Community comes after three years hard work developing the SIF Data Model Implementation Specification (New Zealand) 3.0, by a team of data architects from New Zealand’s government education agencies.

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