Deep Dive: Optimizing Independent School Operations through APIs

Narrator 0:02
welcome to Talking technology with ATLIS, the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens. We'll hear stories from technology directors and other special guests from the Independent School community and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics. And now please welcome your host, Christina Lewellen.

Christina Lewellen 0:26
Hello everyone and welcome back. We are talking tech with ATLIS. I am Christina Lewellen. I'm the Executive Director of the Association of technology leaders in independent schools.

Bill Stites 0:37
And I am Bill Stites. I am the Director of Technology at Montclair Kimberley Academy.

Hiram Cuevas 0:44
And I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of Information Systems and Academic Technology at St. Christopher's School. Welcome, everyone.

Christina Lewellen 0:51
Hey, guys. Hi, Bill. Hi. Hi, Ron. This is exciting, because we're still kind of getting our sea legs under us with this podcast. And when we were talking about getting it rolling, we knew that we wanted to cover ground that was both conceptual and strategic. But sometimes we also recognize that it's useful for our community to do a little bit of a deeper dive on technical issues. And so today, we're diving into something a little bit more techy. Where did you guys come up with this idea? Bill Hiram, who's whose bright idea was this?

Bill Stites 1:24
I will say that everyone on the podcast today is someone that I spoke directly with an about the topic of API's, the idea of what is this application programming interface that you hear vendors talk about, that you hear people talk about. And it's one of those topics where everyone says they've got one, everyone says, Oh, we integrate with and we've got an API that can do X, Y, or Z. And then you've got to really kind of sit down and dig in on it. And I'm going to plug our conversation that we had with Eric Heilmann at Cirrus about data. Because where this started for me, was this question about, okay, we've got all these different data sources. We want to start doing stuff with the data, all the data doesn't talk to one another. It's not all in one place. So how can I get that data out? And into like a Google spreadsheet? Well, you can do that with an API. But I have no idea how to use an API. I've never done anything with an API. So I reached out to a number of people and I reached out to the three guests that we have on this call, and I'm gonna ask them each to introduce themselves. And I'm gonna start with Shonduras. Simon, so shout out Can you introduce yourself?

Shandor Simon 2:40
Sure. I'm Shandor Simon. I'm Director of Technology at Beaver Country Day School. This is my third or fourth school year. And we're about to start in a couple days.

Bill Stites 2:50
Awesome. Nick Marchese, can you introduce yourself?

Nick Marchese 2:53
Hi, I'm Nick Marchese. I'm the director of academic and strategic tech at Emma Willard school in Troy, New York. I'm going into my sixth year, and I'm very excited to be here today. Awesome.

Bill Stites 3:04
And last but not least, Bernie McCormick, can you tell everyone about yourself?

Bernie McCormick 3:09
Hi, I'm Bernie McCormick. I'm the CTO at Marin McDowell Friends School. I've been in education for about 11 years. But I've been in technology for about 25 exclusively on nonprofits after a short stint in Professional Consulting. First

Bill Stites 3:25
off, I want to thank all of you for joining us today. This is kind of like the cathartic piece for me because it brings all the people together that helped me along this journey. And I'm just glad to have everyone here to really kind of share back to the community, part of what I learned from all of you. And hopefully, we can open this up to other people to really start them on their journey down this road as well. So with that said, I want to ask each of you and we can go in any order here. Explain to our audience, how you first got introduced to using API's at your school. And one of the ways in which you're using them at your institutions to really draw things out and make meaning with them. So I'm going to actually start where we ended with Bernie if he could.

Bernie McCormick 4:09
So I actually had a cheat code I knew about API's before I got to school. So most of my frustrations 11 years ago was with the systems that we had not having well formed API's. But the core systems that most schools use a combination of security, identity management, communications, email, an enterprise document all of these things. There's a lot of replication that happens between them. And a lot of that was happening manually. And when you add people to the process, it creates errors. So most of the API's that I'm using internally are around the vendors that have well formed API's and using them as source of truth to feed other systems that either have less robust API's through a spreadsheet the way you were talking about a bill, or at a more programming programming level, which is where more of my Previous experience

Bill Stites 5:00
les net, can you jump in next? Yeah, totally.

Nick Marchese 5:04
You know, I like what Bernie said about like the source of truth. That's what we always kind of seek out here, when we're talking to lots of different systems. My introduction was I've had Google Apps Script, previous experience with doing things with calendars and lots of other fun, fun goodies that we've all dabbled with over the years. And right, during pandemic summer, you know, I learned about this thing called the sky FBI for Blackbaud. And I realized that if I bashed my head enough times against the wall and found my way in, then like, it would be life changing. So I was able to kind of like pull on the resources of others, you know, ask folks from other schools who have done some proof of concept type work. And, you know, once I was able to get into there, combining that, but some of the things that we already had in place, all of a sudden, you had automated, you know, let's say calendar creation, but like now, like rosters would be just automatically update, right? Rather than, Oh, there, you know, 10 kid that add drop today, manually doing it. So that was a really obvious use case for me, which, like anything, when it comes to programming is like, if you have a real challenge and your use case in front of you, it's a lot easier to get into it, rather than doing it all in a conceptual shadow. Yeah,

Shandor Simon 6:16
early in my career, I was taught that a good system administrator is a lazy system administrator. And that I should write scripts and code to automate things to be more consistent and accurate and spend my energy on other things. And so I've always been doing that as part of my job. But as the tools my old school used all started supporting API's, but didn't actually talk to each other, I started getting into using the API's to compare data between systems and do some sanity checking, and eventually automating some of the data flow in my school. And that made me able to be a lot lazier, of a administrator and spend my time on actually helping teachers and students, instead of importing spreadsheets.

Bill Stites 7:03
I think that's great. The idea of the reducing replication, anything that can make me lazier, all for just how about

Christina Lewellen 7:10
we just spin that to like, be more helpful? Anything that can make me more helpful to teachers and learners? Okay.

Bill Stites 7:19
No, definitely give me the opportunity to provide more support to others in other areas. It's not lazy. It's just redirecting yourselves. But the source of truth, that's one of the things that I think is really a key point on all of these is those different pieces where we've got all of this data, what do we say is authoritative? And then how do we leverage that in those other areas? Bernie, I think you mentioned you know, the identity management, I think that's a key piece of it, you know, what API's support the ability to simply click that login with button. You know, what I mean, that you can use across multiple systems hire Minaya, when we spend time working, you know, with our own schools and with other schools, one of the things we'll look at is like, how many different usernames and passwords are you having to manage? And keep in your head? And how can you leverage something like for us at MK leveraging Google, and using the API's that are built in at that level to connect those in other ways? And what I think is really nice is in certain pieces with this, I think, Nick, you mentioned using the sky API, you know, the ways in which some of the companies that we work with, provide these real easy ways of saying I've got an API cool, we work with an API, let's just connect the two and go from there. And that is, at its very base is the simplest and that are there tools that you are using at your school, where you've just had that simple, you know, we've got an API, we connect with that API, let's make it work. You have examples of of ways in which you've connected those or other similar things like that.

Nick Marchese 9:08
Was just to make sure I'm understanding your question correctly. Yeah, I haven't found in our systems, two systems that have API's that are directly connected to each other, right? Aside from having a middleman, like a clever or something like that, or like a class link that's doing that. But you know, that was one of those things that was really irking me this summer, right? So we have the summer list of aspirational things. And for us, we use Freshservice for our asset management, and mozal for our MDM. Both have API's both don't talk to each other. So one of my summer projects, which I will say there was a success at the end, was building a bridge between them. So I may able to now we can assign a device to a user in mobile, and connecting to both API's, it automatically assigns it back into Freshservice to that user And when we put the asset tag numbers in Freshservice, automatically pushed them over to mozal. And I think there's a lot more that we'll be able to do there. But it was a bit of a proof of concept that we, we can build these bridges, even if there's not an official documented connection between the two of them, it's just a matter of a bit of a sheer will to make it happen. And a little bit of luck, and a really, really happy tech who's willing to just like help you get the syntax correct. So

Hiram Cuevas 10:24
one of the things that I found fascinating about the assembly of people here in this room, is that I've had the opportunity to to hear each of them present. And one of the super strengths as a superpower of ATLIS is its capacity to share. And I must admit, I've learned a great deal i, it wasn't until this summer. And I think Bill and I are very close in terms of our skill set in terms of API's, we're really just getting our toes into the water. And then this summer, I had a data intern that that actually had reached out to Nick, who shared his framework, and we had some ideas from what Chandler has done what Bernie has done. And we've, we've started to make some serious strides in connecting these systems and having you know, what is that authoritative source for your school. And it's so important that that's not just coming from your office, but that's actually bought in by the entire school, because each of the different silos that you have, may consider themselves as the authoritative source. And it's so so important for us to recognize that there really should be one system that's doing all of that checking behind the scenes, I'm so fired up with this conversation, I can barely contain myself. Because just in the small amount of work we did this summer, I can already see you know how we're able to extrapolate this to other areas.

Shandor Simon 11:42
So I think what Nick was describing is really interesting that you can build your own integrations between different systems, that can be a lot of work, I've done that kind of thing to what I want people listening to this to know is that you can start really much smaller and simpler, the most recent API project I did here at my school, we're dealing right now with the unfortunate situation around parking. And we wanted to know how far our students were in terms of their commute, like, who can walk. And so I took a Google sheet of all of our students, and I wrote 12 lines of App Script code that uses the Google Maps API, to map every family from where they live to our school at eight o'clock on a Monday morning. And it will tell me how far it is and miles, how long it is in minutes. I can also get that same information for public transit, bicycles, walking, all that kind of thing. But it was only 12 lines of code. And I got that code, mostly from a Google search on how to use App Script and the Google API. And even though I've done a ton of work in App Script with API's, I still started by googling it. And then it was just a matter of tweaking a little bit of code, and boom, I had an answer in about 15 minutes.

Christina Lewellen 13:02
You're so proud of yourself, aren't you? Do you love that? Well,

Shandor Simon 13:06
I love that when my Associate Head of School had this problem, I could solve it.

Bill Stites 13:10
Yeah, that's great. Bernie, how about you,

Bernie McCormick 13:12
the approachability is really a big piece here. Because there's a lot of technical jargon, it can be big and scary and intimidating for folks. Having the right access can sometimes be an impediment is not every user has the access to the systems that they need to be able to use an API at its fullest. But if you're a system administrator, and you have the admin access to your tools, you probably have the access you need to the system. And I teach this to our high school students in our computer science, this is their second semester work is API's. They've learned some sort of programming code in the beginning, either JavaScript or Python. And they're ending by playing with API's. So it is approachable even to our students. So it's certainly something that I need the technical specialists in schools should be able to tackle. There's some great tools out there, API dog is one and postman is another that are really helpful in modeling these bridges that everybody keeps talking about. And the ways that API's can sort of talk either to each other or used to be pulled as a source to get into another system or a spreadsheet or you know, the endpoints of what you're doing very significantly. I had mentioned in passing and higher kind of give me a look, you know, a well formed API, versus just an API. There's lots of companies and vendors that are like, Oh, we have API's, we have API's, what those API's can do, how much of the data you can get out of a system? Can you use the API to write data back into the system? These are all higher level questions that really get into the guts of what we're going to be talking about today. But at a very basic level, API's are accessible and Google like Shonda is totally right. You can figure this stuff out with not a lot of leverage, if you know your way around to coat it.

Christina Lewellen 14:54
Can I jump into just ask a question about that? Because some of our tech leaders we know come from More of the academic side of the house. So it might be fairly simple for somebody with a bit of technical expertise. But let's say someone really truly doesn't know where to start, or even what the benefits are. What would you encourage, you know, this is kind of where Hiram and Bill were coming from, like, I don't know what I'm doing here. So where do you start? And is that Hiram? Bill? Why you guys reached out to the folks on our podcast today to say help me, please. But even understanding I think taking that step back and understanding what the benefit can be.

Hiram Cuevas 15:32
Yes, Christina? That's absolutely right. I mean, you hear about the API, you you learn what the benefits are. And then at that point, you're like, Okay, so how do I deal with this, and there's never a one on one API course, to really just grab onto. But when you go to enough sessions, or webinars, or you see posts from folks like Shawn door, Nick, and Bernie, the light turns on, and you're like, okay, alright, I can do this. And you start to ask questions, and then you start to dabble. And then you start to truly see the power of that API to work for you at your school. Yeah,

Bill Stites 16:04
it's really interesting, because, you know, I've mentioned those ones that just talk to one another. So like, at MK, we use veracross. And you've got the ability to set up these connections with these other services. So the question I asked earlier about, like, do you have ones that you're using that you just simply push buttons, and it uses the API to connect? Again, we're on veracross, we use rubner, for like emergency notification, and kind of like some lockdown drills and these types of things? Well, there's a direct integration there. So they're leveraging the API, we just say, here's the information you need. And I'll give it that one second. But here's the information that you need, you can now get in and you can read all the information about who our students are, who the families are, who the employees are. So on a school closure for a snow day, or a hurricane, or whatever you might, you know, all that information is over in this system already. When somebody updates it in their cross, it goes right over, you know, where if we run a drill, a fire drill, a lockdown drill, we can take this Real Time Attendance, and it syncs up in the attendance. That's a great example of at least in my mind, a system two different systems that are separate, but connected and connected through this API, and this readwrite access. And those, you know, you think about, alright, well, who do I want to share my information with? And how are they getting at my information? You know, you think back to identity and identity management? Well, you know, the idea of usernames and passwords, you know, what does somebody need to know to do this? Well, you need to know, first off, again, that these do exist, some of them are pre built, they are secure. One of the things that I spent a lot of time working with with Shaandaar on when we were going down this road of getting this to work is you actually have basically what is referred to as a client ID and a client secret. And that's basically your username and password for working with an API to grant access from one group to the other. So there are certain things when you start thinking about what do I need to know to use these at the very base level? It correlates very closely to the way in which we use existing systems already. So gender, can you kind of talk a little bit about the ways in which you've started to use these things you mentioned being like lazy, and being more productive? Let's just go back to Christina kind of reframing that term a little bit there. But can you talk about ways in which you've leveraged API's in your institution, not the how, but the ways in which you've taken these things and put them to use so that you can be more productive and have more time, so you're not having to be quite as repetitive? Sure,

Shandor Simon 18:50
happy to belt. I've done a lot of different things, a whole bunch of them are just about getting data from one place to another or making sure the data makes sense. So an example of that might be we have Jillian mailinglist, here at the school that are based off of roles. And so if I know from my si s that a teacher is in the middle school, they shouldn't be in the middle school mailing list. So I have something that checks that they're actually on that mailing list, and if not adds them. So there's a lot of little just things and doing sanity checks and moving data around. I also have found that I can combine different tools we have and build new things. So in my last school, I build a student feedback system on courses that used a survey platform and its API's, and our si s and its API's and authentication. So students hit my webpage, they authenticated against our LMS. And then their list of classes showed up, they picked the class and they were moved to the survey tool with all of the class information pre populated. So there's a lot of different sort of ways to put these tools together. Stupid little things like badging On the copier is every time you're issued a new badge number, you know, a new badge, it has a new number, and it has to get updated in the system. So I have a little script that does that every night. I've integrated in my last school, our lockdown overhead building paging system with our door system to lock doors. So I also want to pick up on a thread, though, that you brought up build that sometimes vendors are using these API's to talk to each other. And I would suggest that even if you're not ready to use API's, that when you're looking at new products, should that be part of your app vetting, because if they don't have an API, then other vendors can't write stuff to it. And you can't pay someone to write something for you, if you're not ready to do it. And you can't write it yourself. 100%. So I think that should be part of the app vetting for any new system you're bringing into your school.

Nick Marchese 20:52
I think that's such a great, Shonda, I think, like, there's some systems that were definitely in place before my time here. And like, I think I would have liked it that was part of the vetting process, right. So that way, you know, you're able to go ahead and move that data around and make those connections, you know, kind of going to what you were saying about, like, combining different tools to like, make us more productive, as we like to say, right? So one of the things that makes me really not productive, was the amount of times I had to upload spreadsheets into things like remind, or Apple school manager, every time a kid changed his cell phone number, things had to be updated. And those two things do not have API's, right. But by phone, Skype, it does. So you know, being able to leverage that to bring stuff into spreadsheets, where you need to use anyway. And then finding some other tools like Microsoft Power automate, that can act as the bridge from Google Drive, to those systems that have SFTP uploads. And I know we're feel like we're getting into the jargon. So hopefully, we're not losing folks too much. But none of this, at least I will say for this piece that I'm referring to is much simpler than some of the other things we've spoken about. Because of that that power automate system, if anybody else who used to it's very drag and drop compared to typing out code,

Bill Stites 22:11
we'll try to put all links in the show notes with all the stuff here so people can kind of

Nick Marchese 22:15
go back and dig in on that. So leveraging sky API to, you know, build out spreadsheets and CSVs, where the rosters and then having this other tool that's free, fresh, right, to be able to just move that data for you. You know, it's technically an API and that second half, but being able to combine multiple pieces to make us more productive. Let's say, it's another great example, that has been a game changer for me in the last three months. Now it's running every night by itself. Never look at it. Bernie, can

Bernie McCormick 22:50
you jump in? Yeah. And some of what Nick was referencing was what I wanted to jump in, we're stepping on each other. You know, be advice about making sure vendor has an API, you want to be really specific about those questions. What Nick is describing, he used the word SFTP. That is an API from some people's perspective. It's not a true API. But it's the way that vendors have been doing things since the early aughts, the whole concept of API's goes all the way back to the 40s. This isn't a new idea. It's been around about as long as programming and even before there was true digital programming that was still punchcard days, API's existed. What changed is in the early aughts, when people threw them on the web, and now suddenly, you didn't need to have your computers on the same network to use an API that could do over the internet. And SFTP is still the gold standard. You know, four out of five big vendors are like, oh, yeah, we can do that. SFTP. So you're writing complicated code to create what is essentially a gimped. Spreadsheet, that you're then shuttling from one place to another, you're doing that through scripts, you're doing that through some automations.

Bill Stites 23:51
And Bernie, just to clarify, SFTP, what does that acronym secure

Bernie McCormick 23:56
FTP, so FTP is File Transfer Protocol, it goes back all the way to the beginning of time, almost, it's about as old as web pages. And SFTP was like, Oh, hey, here's this thing everybody's using, maybe we should put some seatbelts on it. And it begins the idea that you have to have some security associated with the moving of files and viewing of files and access to files. And it's where modern API's really shine, because you're building that security layer. And I think somebody was mentioning, Maven, you bill, the ways in which data is accessed. And the ways in which it's being transferred is invisible to a human. Right. It's only people who have access to the code base and the services that could even get a look at whether or not it's working, right. And they still can't necessarily get it the data depending on how you set things up, which is a good thing. It's a powerful

Anne Sena 24:43
thing. And hire me,

Bill Stites 24:45
you mentioned ways in which you're using this with your ID cards, correct?

Hiram Cuevas 24:48
Yes. So actually, just to follow up really quickly on Bernie's comments, when you were talking about SFTP. I remember the first time I was using FTP when I was creating web pages back in the day and realize, Oh my gosh, you're showing the username and password in the index file. And I'm just like, oh, this is not good, we need a better way to do this. And that's what we moved to the SFTP format. So sometimes people just use the tools that they're given without even realizing the lack of security. So at St. Christopher's, we are actually leveraging blackboards API in order to produce our identity cards for the students and for the faculty. So we have procs card, so it's going to work with our access control. So we've got an API pulling the information out of Blackbaud, into access control into our car production software, and also into Odin, because that procs card has a barcode has got the chip and it has a mag strip. And so we've taken all of those endpoints and encoded them onto the cards, including the faculty and student pictures, which has been a godsend in that case. But one of the things that, as I think we all know is that when an API breaks, Everybody Hurts. And it's so important to also maintain your, your API's as well.

Bill Stites 26:03
So to that point, one of the things that I think about, and we talked about this with Eric Heilmann when we were talking about this guidebook, around research, independent tools, and the way in which you need to think about managing and mapping your data so that you know where all of that stuff is. So I think that plays out really well here. Because when I think about when I share data maps with people, I go with a traffic light model, when I'm laying the things out, I'll lay all of the pieces out on the map. And then I draw lines connecting, showing whether data is going from one system to the next, whether it's got an arrow on both ends, meaning is it one way or two way did, but then I color code them, and I color code them based on that traffic light model, where you've got the red light, which for me, I code them as black. If it's manual, that's what you want to stay away from, I code them as read, if they're a CSV file. And I forget who mentioned, you know, just using CSVs, this is the way we would move data into these systems. If we didn't have API's, you will hear everyone you know, just fill out this Excel spreadsheet or fill out this Google Sheet and send it to me, Well, that's a CSV file, that's just rows and columns of data that you need to put headers on and send those over. So the CSV piece there, as Bernie was talking about, you know, you go, then I go into the SFTP pieces were all labeled, label them as yellow, those are great. Those can be automated, those are secure. Those are generating those CSVs and sending them between systems in ways that reduce me from having to touch them. So very base level, then there's the ones that I code is green, and those are the ones are the API's, those things that are either pre set up, or that I can set up when I have the skill set, which I currently don't at this point, again, why I'm friends with all the people on this call, because they have the skill set. But using those than to kind of doing that. So pardon me, I think it was Hiram that mentioned, you know, your vetting process when you're bringing on new vendors. And looking at the API's. This is great when you start thinking about all of these things holistically when you start looking at your data across the entire school. And you look at the needs that you've got, whether it's from, you know, an institutional research standpoint, whether it's from the standpoint of having to create ID cards, or just simply getting grades or information from one place to another, having all of those things mapped out and knowing what's there and knowing what you need to know for the next step for another system that you might bring in and what those is incredibly helpful.

Bernie McCormick 28:45
Yeah, and Bill to sort of take what you're describing one step further, I had mentioned a couple of different tools like postman, which combine that design building the visual design building process, with developing the code underneath it at the same time. So if you think about Lucid Chart, or the old Microsoft tool that people used to use, make wireframes. Like any of those tools, you're creating a visual design, and then they'd hand that off to somebody and then go do some coding using the visual design. These newer tools are actually using standard code blocks based on API call familiarity that goes across all systems, right? And creating meta code blocks as you're creating your visual diagram. So it's saving you time and efficacy. Shandra you had mentioned that time when you use something like that to sort of help save time and development. Yeah,

Shandor Simon 29:36
Bernie I had this issue during COVID that we were trying to use Zoom a lot I know really unique story there. And one of the things we did was have a parents evening right in every teacher was supposed to set up meetings and certain why. And there are lots of options, waiting rooms, not waiting rooms, pass codes, record to Cloud automatically, ultimate us and Step one at this was to ask, you know, like 2030 people to follow the same instructions and get it right. And that didn't work perfectly. The instructions were complicated mistakes happened. It wasn't ideal. And so I was like, I'd really like to automate the creation of these meetings using an API. So I've never used a zoom API before. And I needed to figure out, I knew what I wanted to do create a meeting with a whole bunch of settings for someone else. So zoom has some actually excellent documentation, that's always a good place to start. But you're looking at this documentation before you write any code. And you're like, I still don't quite understand how this works, how to do this. And you can use a tool like postman, it's sort of almost like a web browser for API's. And it sort of helps you fill out forms and sort of look at the results and sort of play around with the API till you understand it before you write any code. And it actually can write some of the code for you, there's a little menu, like write code in JavaScript for me to do what I just did. So it can make it easier. But really, it's using these tools sort of to explore and sort of do the sort of wireframe of how is this all going to work before I go out, and actually write a line of code. So that's my usual workflow is start with the documentation, failed to understand it, play around with a tool like postman to actually understand it, and then try writing code, some

Bill Stites 31:24
of those things that can automate the process for you. So you don't know how to do it. I mean, I think that John Doe, to just, you and I are going back and forth on a number of zoom calls when I was trying to figure this out, you saying that, you know, just looking at the code and trying to dissect it, having something that can do that for you very simply and very easily, you know, I think is incredibly helpful. I went from that conversation, really commit to you to the work that you were doing with the Blackbaud stuff and the sky API, and the way in which you were you were making that work. And I want to put a link, we'll put a link to you put together a little screencast of what you were doing and how you were making it work. But can you just explain what you did in that project alone, because that for somebody that really doesn't understand something or something needs something that's kind of like a, what I call a low code way of doing something?

Nick Marchese 32:24
I thought that was a wonderful example. Yeah, absolutely. Once I got to the point, with my experience with Skye with Blackbaud, by understanding it enough to be like, there's not enough people who have experience using this. And I know a lot of people probably want to be able to use this, I made it a mission to try and build out something so that I can share at ATLIS conference. And that's quickly started with me trying to build out a coding almost like template that folks could take with that. And then I quickly realized, folks don't know always how to code. So that shifted into building a code set that's attached to a Google sheet at like a drop down menu. So that way, there was no coding that needed to be done by the end user, they just had to make a copy of the spreadsheet that had this drop down menu built in this custom drop down menu built in. And all they essentially had to do is connect their incense, grab a couple of usernames and secret tokens from their Blackbaud account, and hit go. And then you know, kind of the proof of concept was less, right. So if you're blackballed school, especially, that's kind of what a lot of a lot of stuff is built on. So once you got connected brings in all of your lists, and then you could choose which ones, you want to automatically be syncing every hour into your spreadsheet. Now, that's 400,000 rows list, then like, we might have a problem because you know how much your program are over here. But it felt like a great way to get that hello world a little bit easier for folks to be able to kind of jump in and access the data that they want to be accessing. And at least in my world, and kind of circling back to our topic at the very beginning, the source of truth can often live in lots of places because folks don't feel comfortable in the place working in something like Blackbaud, right. So if we can get it into a place where they are comfortable like a Google Sheets, then it's easier for us to always just be changing the data at the top. And then they all work in something at the end with the Google Sheets. That's been, I think, a really incredible and successful experience and made a great lot of great connections with that. And I'm happy to share and talk with anybody about it. So Nick,

Hiram Cuevas 34:38
we actually grabbed onto your presentation and did just that. And one of the best cases we develop this summer we have over 33 people onboarding this year, and we automated our extension list that is on our STS net or internal directory essentially. And so now whenever we populate that information, as part of the onboarding process, it automatically updates our phoneless for people to take a look at. And that's all using the sky API out of Blackbaud. Bernie, I was wondering if you might want to speak about one roster, or LTI, for some of our academic tech folks who probably hear about that when they're dealing with textbooks or various SaaS applications that would benefit from these areas.

Bernie McCormick 35:19
Yeah, so we're kind of biologically exposing the need for things like one roster in this conversation in the podcast, because as Nick is talking about code reuse, and like sharing spreadsheets, and Shonduras, talking to you about ways that it's been used in the past, you end up reinventing the wheel over and over and over again, and vendors got hip to this. And they recognize like, oh, how much and what kinds of data are people sharing about kids, if you're dealing with something like an LMS, you need to know what their class is, what the students name is, maybe some other metadata, it's a pretty open standard of things. Instead of writing it over and over and over again, let's just build a library standard. And that's what one roster is, if you have a vendor that is one roster compliant, or that is touting that their API is one roster compliant, that means that they have pre built their system to accept or provide data in a way that is standard across multiple vendors. It's sort of like a seal of authenticity that everybody can sort of, oh, I won't have to do a lot of work to do this. Because it's very well documented, it's very well supported. They've dealt with the bugs of things like what do you do when a kid has a tilde in their name? Or what do you do when a kid has three first names, like they know how to do all of that, because it's been handled by a consortium of vendors or a group of vendors who are saying, hey, let's pull resources and make this easier for our clients. So I think on the academic technology side, one roster is very often used to that digital collections, as you mentioned, so if somebody's coming out of an LMS, getting to a digital textbook, that's a way that the textbook vendors talking back and forth to the LMS to make sure like, is this kid in a class that has the right license, go instead of the old way of doing things where people had to upload spreadsheets and class rosters changes, and oh, Jimmy's moving into a new history class, but now he can't get the textbook for three days. So you know, all of us are supporting learning and students, and you want that to be as seamless as possible. So that's one of the places where looking at ed tech standards around data transfers in API's really helps. Because you know, you're not going to have to go out and build your toolbox before you start building your bridge. You've already got a blueprint for a bridge and a box of tools, you just have to kind of put it together for your needs.

Bill Stites 37:29
Yeah, and that one roster piece. And, Nick, you mentioned this early on when we were talking and one of the initial questions that using like classlink, or ADLINK is almost like that middleware. That man in the middle. I've dated in system a I needed to get in system B. But I got to use this service in the middle that one rostered standard. And those tools like classlink are had like, they allow you to send data in the format that your system a has it to them, they'll transform that data into that one roster data, and then move that over. And I think that that's great. I'd love if you can go from point A to point B without having to go to somebody in between for a variety of reasons from liability, and just data transfer and all of those things, but that one rostered standard that has come out I think, is going to simplify all of our lives, you know, the more our vendors can build towards that, for sharing data. I remember, at one of the ATLIS conferences two years ago, we have a data group that came together. And Denise Musselwhite actually mentioned, you know, we should really push our vendors on this. And I think that's exactly what one roster is doing for us is it's allowing us to push our vendors to say, hey, we've got all these systems. Some of them may be in competition from one another, but we need to get data from one of them to the other. And one roster or having an open API, you know, with well formed data will allow us to do all of these things. So when you think about what all of your needs are in schools, with data, whether it's using one roster these things, I think it gives you some great places to start there. Your something you wanted to add to this. Yeah,

Nick Marchese 39:18
I think like that's all really great and well and good. And I was I like the one roster stuff. I feel like it's been actually been around right out, it'd been burning for maybe helping out here, like for a while. And I feel like I've heard the most about it, you know, only in the last couple of years or so. But you know, at least in my experience with a lot of things. While we are starting to find that standard of like, what is the dataset look like? They're still not directly talking to each other most of the time. They're still great. Now we have a standard way to download the CSV files. So until we get to the point where not only is the format the same, but also we can connect to each other. We're going to keep having this conversation. So I'm hopeful that we will get there And I think there are probably good people behind it. But today, I'm not giving up my API's.

Unknown Speaker 40:05
Let's just say that.

Bill Stites 40:06
The one thing I wanted to ask everyone, just so that we can kind of throw one little bit out. And then I'm going to ask Christina to bring us home on this. What would be one recommendation that you would want to give people listening to this of like, where would you go to start? Like, what would be the one thing like, if you're interested in this, what would you say would be that one place? Or that one thing? Shandur? Can

you start? Yeah,

Shandor Simon 40:33
I would say start small, find something in a bite size piece. Don't try to integrate your LMS. And so if that doesn't have an integration, and I'm going to write an API calls to both of these things, like find something maybe like that Zoom example, I gave something that is a relatively small problem that doesn't have an immediate deadline, that you can sort of dip your toe in the waters or like, Nick has this really neat solution in Google workspace with Apps Script and sheets, start just using his thing and don't do any API calls and just do some Google Sheet stuff with it. And then when, when you've gotten a little bit used to working with data like that, build on it, you know, like, Hey, can I get one other piece of data from another system and compare it with this, and slowly build up your skill set, it can be really overwhelming, if you just jump into the deep end of the pool. So just start small.

Bill Stites 41:33
Nick, how about you,

Nick Marchese 41:35
I appreciate that shout out Shaandaar. I think starting small is obviously like a really important thing. And like having a really tangible thing you're trying to tackle. Because if it's just all conceptual, it's probably not going to feel meaningful, you're going to lose a drive. So having something that you really want to go ahead and tackle, maybe that you just want to go ahead and pull in email addresses for students into one sheet, or you just want to go ahead and, you know, see if you've even hit this data point on one of your systems, just like having something that's really meaningful to you, because that's where that motivation is going to come from. If it's, it's just because we're telling you to do it, you're not going to do it.

Unknown Speaker 42:17
Bernie,

Bernie McCormick 42:20
I would say the best starting place is conceptual. And we jumped right into some technical and observational, when I teach this to high school kids actually spend a whole 40 minutes just getting the concept across. And there's a company called mule soft, that is actually used for building API's. The other end of things when you're a software vendor and want to build an API, but they've got a great three and a half minute video that sort of breaks down like what an API is using non technical jargon is purely like, how do these things work? Right. And it's meant to sort of kick off developers who are then going to write API's for software. But it's applicable also to people who are learning how to do it. And I agree with my esteemed colleagues here, you know, having a use case having a limited use case. But I'm also going to recommend having a deadline. Because of all of these overwhelming aspects to an API, it's really easy to say like, Oh, I'm just not going to deal with that for two weeks, you know, having somebody say to you, whether it's an Associate Head of School, or a vendor, saying, we're not going to support CSV files anymore, you know, you can build yourself out a goal saying, I need to be able to get my procs cards activated or deactivated from my LMS. And I've got to be able to do it by the end of the summer. And that motivates you to learn the things that you really need to learn. And along the way, you pick up tools that are then applicable in other places, and which is the goal, when I'm teaching this in high school, I'm not trying to get a bunch of high school kids to be developers, by the time they're freshmen in college, it's to give them some exposure, and conceptual knowledge, which is the most important rudimentary point, and then they can go and apply it to whatever they end up using.

Christina Lewellen 43:54
I love it. Thank you, Bernie, that was a really great kind of reminder, in terms of where to start. I think as I bring this podcast today, home, we've covered so much about what you guys have done some of your examples that you've applied at your school. So what my question is, for all five of you, as we wrap this up, is if I handed you a magic wand, and you could magically have an API that would solve a problem for you, what would it do?

Bill Stites 44:21
I'll jump in on Hiram as an example. Because I need this now. And it's one of the things to Bernie's point as well set yourself a deadline, I need to develop ID cards for our school. So thinking about like the school's information system, the access control system, the point of sale system, the library system, I need to be able to gather data and push data to all these places. So if I had one that could work with all the systems that I need, and was open on both ends, that would be what I would want immediately in order to get these cars Without so that we could have this single point of truth that hangs around everyone's neck that people lose on a daily basis.

Hiram Cuevas 45:07
Good answer, we have a special unique

situation with a coordinate program with St Catharines. And so we have students in both schools. And so we're constantly working with CSV files that both schools and I would love to be able to automate some of the data sharing that has to happen with the enrollment between two different site IDs, which is problematic in and of itself, because you have to authenticate it to different systems. And this is a thumbs up to build brought up rubbed up earlier. And Roberto was actually able to do that using a district model for our two side IDs for accountability for crisis management. And so we actually see the boys and the girls within one instance, which has been fabulous. So when we have a situation, either teacher on whatever campus can see all the boys and girls on their individual rosters, which has been fabulous. So it just shows you the potential and the scalability of an API, if done correctly, I

Bernie McCormick 46:06
would say my magic wand would be something that could cause API's to become well formed. So most of the things that I have have some form of an API, but it doesn't have the endpoints I need or the endpoint exists, but doesn't provide any error handling. So your job fails, but you don't know why. And, you know, it's like, I'm not dealing primarily with folks who don't provide API's. But I have a wide variety. It's like a used car salesman, lot of like, what features work and don't, and you're kind of figuring it out as you need it. So that's what my magic wand would be like, give me a nice, fresh, new 2023 electric vehicle. With all the bells and whistles in place,

Unknown Speaker 46:46
this will appease someone

Shandor Simon 46:47
that just bought a 2023 automobile that has a lot of bugs. I'm not sure you're wishing for the right thing. Bernie, I will say I also am driven nuts by API's that don't quite have the one feature that I need that their website has. But I think my real answer to this question is, there are some vendors that I don't think traditionally work with schools like ours, and they charge for the API's and king's ransom. And so our payroll vendor, I can't afford to get API access, I think it would cost more than another HR person. So I'm hoping that vendors become a little more reasonable what they charge for API's, I think the school based vendors are pretty reasonable. But it's those ones that don't work with schools much that I've run into some issues. And

Nick Marchese 47:39
I think I'll tag on to Bernie's answer. I think there are a lot of tools that we have that have API's, which is great, a lot that are missing that one thing was using one the other day, and I was like, well, it says you have that then you dig into sport. And that doesn't exist. And having those really great vendors who are willing to iterate and improve those API endpoints, summer have really robust communities about that. And they're really transparent. And they are updating that regularly. And some it's, it is what it is and not going to change. Or there's no you have no idea if it's going to change. So I would love just like more, I think just more in general. More

Christina Lewellen 48:23
in general, that's a great place to leave it. I'm grateful for your answers on the magic one question because I have no doubt that this podcast once it drops, we'll create some discussion on the access points, discussion boards that ATLIS hosts, I think that knowing what your magic wand wishlist is may generate some feedback and some discussion. And I certainly encourage all of our listeners to continue to connect in with the ATLIS community in that way. If you've heard something that sparks either questions or ideas from this podcast, go over to our discussion boards and let's have some communication. Our vendors are there to help support us, our community is there to support each other. Gentlemen, I'd like to thank you all for your expertise, and for kind of laying out there all the good, bad and ugly parts of this work that you've been doing. Thank you for joining us on the podcast and we'll continue the conversation online.

Narrator 49:17
This has been talking technology with ATLIS produced by the Association of technology leaders and independent schools. For more information about ATLIS and ATLIS membership, please visit the ATLIS.org If you enjoyed this discussion, please subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your colleagues in the independent school community. Thank you for listening

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