VIP
TONE ELIMINATES ECONOMIC BARRIERS TO ADOPTING TECHNOLOGY
IN SMALL SCHOOL DISTRICTS
The "No School Left Behind" Program Grants
FREE Software Licenses to U.S. School Districts with
less than 1,000 Students
ALAMEDA, Calif. - OCT 9, 2007 -- VIP Tone, Inc. today
announced that it will grant FREE, perpetual licenses
of its School MATRIX® 2.0 web-based data management
platform to small K-12 public school districts in the
United States. By offering the software licenses at
NO COST to districts with less than 1,000 students,
VIP Tone is eliminating the traditional economical barriers
that prevent many of these districts from automating
their student data management and reporting. Based on
data from the National Center for Education Statistics
(NCES), 8,700 US districts, representing more than half
of all US school districts, are eligible to receive
this free software grant. The thrust behind this philanthropic
program is to accelerate the adoption of technology
and data-driven decision support tools that enable US
schools to meet State and Federal (e.g. No Child Left
Behind) reporting requirements and improve student achievement.
No School Left Behind (NSLB) is a 3-year Software Grant
Program, for which qualified school districts are encouraged
to apply before January 15 each year, starting in 2008.
School MATRIX 2.0 will start shipping in January 2008
to qualified districts that apply for the software grant
and that intend to deploy it at the onset of the 2008/09
academic school year. Grant application materials as
well as full documentation of the NSLB Software Grant
Program are available at http://www.viptone.com/NSLB
VIP Tone's web-based School MATRIX Platform is a full
suite of integrated data and content management tools.
The Suite includes a Student Information System (SIS)
that is tightly integrated with a comprehensive standards-based
Instructional Management System (IMS), consisting of
various modules to manage the curriculum, lesson plans,
formative and summative assessments, staff professional
development and Individualized Education Plans (IEP's).
In addition to being pre-integrated with the EduTone™
Portal, School MATRIX 2.0 has unique role-based access
rights for all stakeholders, including teachers, counselors,
curriculum administrators, principals, district administrators,
students and parents. The EduTone Portal aggregates
free and fee-based content and applications from various
sources and can be easily integrated with any data management
system and data directory already in use in adopting
districts.
Serving more than 3.6 million students within 7,000
schools, VIP Tone's global reach positions it to extend
this initiative across international boundaries to build
an unparalleled network of educator collaboration and
learning. Having established a strong base of users
in Australia, where its SIS product is the market share
leader, VIP Tone has access to a rich set of empirical
data as well as educator resources. VIP Tone's sites
in the United States, including LEAs and IEAs, will
be able to serve as initial contributors to and partners
within the Software Grant Program sharing both expertise
and resources with those districts availing of this
opportunity. These Districts, selecting from the myriad
of functions and features available within School MATRIX
2.0, are using the software to achieve various District-specific
outcomes - some representative examples, as well as
results, follow:
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"School MATRIX has allowed
us to totally rethink the connection between assessment
data and curriculum," said Chief Information
Officer, Paul Hamann of Jessamine County Schools
in Kentucky. "The vision of the Data Driven
Decision Making (D3M) model has been altered and
extended through the potential of this application.
We are now considering data connections in ways
that we had not previously envisioned."
"We have implemented all of the School MATRIX
modules," said Brad McCauley, curriculum
director, Sergeant Bluff-Luton Community School
District in Iowa. "In addition to an online
student registration system, parents are now able
to access all of the information about each of
their children's attendance, behavior, lessons
and performance, including state test results,
all through the Web. "
"We have started with the implementation
of the School MATRIX instructional and assessment
modules first, "said Kathy Coley, superintendent,
Glenpool School District in Oklahoma. "However,
we eventually decided to replace our old SIS with
it and we now have a single integrated student-centric
data management system for both school administration
and instruction. "
"School MATRIX is very flexible and has been
serving us very well," said Jeff Bottorff,
director of technology, Madera County Office of
Education in California. "It is a very comprehensive
and easy to use system that allows us to capture,
manage and report administrative data with ease
and flexibility."
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In addition to a free license of School MATRIX 2.0,
under this grant program, VIP Tone is offering school
districts the ability to purchase highly discounted
deployment options, including: (a) centralized ASP hosting,
administration and support; (b) a self-installing locally-hosted
server appliance; or (c) a software-based virtual appliance.
Alternatively, any small district will be able to self-host,
self-install and self-support the FREE version of the
product. Phone-based customer support and Web-based
training is available for $99 per hour. An average school
district will be able to deploy School MATRIX 2.0 for
a small fraction of the monthly cost of a single headcount,
while reducing operational costs as various labor-intensive
administrative tasks including attendance tracking,
scheduling, assessing, grading, reporting and communications
are automated. "
The No School Left Behind Program
will help level the playing field and allow small school
districts to apply their limited funding towards more
teaching resources in their classrooms, powered by innovative
decision support tools, while complying with mandatory
reporting requirements," said Robert Iskander,
founder and CEO of VIP Tone, "School MATRIX 2.0
will also be available and localized beyond the US in
the near future. We plan to announce new initiatives
that will foster collaboration and communication across
our global end-user community to facilitate the creation
and sharing of self-developed educational content, tools,
resources, applications as well as the identification
and promotion of best practices."
About VIP Tone, Inc.
VIP Tone helps educators create world-class school environments
with one integrated solution for their learning, communication
and collaboration needs. Our product set consists of
VIP PBX™, an IP telephony communication and messaging
system; School MATRIX®, an education resource planning
(ERP) solution; and the EduTone Appliance™, a pre-integrated
K-20 educational software and content services delivery
infrastructure that features an enterprise portal with
ID management and automated provisioning technology.
We serve over 3,600,000 students and over 100,000 teachers
in over 7,000 schools around the globe. VIP Tone is
a privately held company headquartered in Alameda, California.
For more information, visit the VIP Tone web site at
www.viptone.com.
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