The Access 4 Learning Community publish the SIF xPress Roster Technical Handbook

WASHINGTON - Nov. 18, 2015 - PRLog -- This handbook provides a concise overview laying out all the pieces you need to get started with SIF xPress Roster.  It also walks through some practical examples where meaningful data exchanges happen using the simplified SIF 3 REST Infrastructure.

A SIF implementation requires three components:
•  Authentication – proof that an interface is allowed to access an application
•  Infrastructure – setup to exchange information with an approved interface
•  Data – actual information exchanged between approved interfaces

Each component is addressed to foster understanding, implementation, integration and a technical foundation for addressing future education needs.  The A4L Community’s unique make-up of educators, vendors, and information technology professions are collaboratively building simplified APIs enabling access to the data and impacting learning through real world products, services, integrations, and solutions.

Why is roster important? At the simplest level, a roster is a list of students/learners in a program, class/section, or organization: a school, district, or regional entity.Rosters are important because any kind of instructional or administrative application that supports the teacher in the classroom requires a link between the students in a class/section and the teacher. That link is sometimes obvious and implicit in the relationship of the teacher to the section, but at other times with software programs, or project-based learning, more explicit relationships need to be created between the students and the teacher. This roster of students is required by all software applications that support students and gives the teacher the ability to manage, coach, and teach the students.  Rosters in education are one of the fundamental building blocks of any instructional, curricular, assessment, or administrative application.

To review the SIF xPress Roster Technical Handbook, please go to: https://www.a4l.org/Resources/Documents/SIF_xPress_Roster-Technical_Handbook.pdf

To complement the Technical Handbook, the A4L Community has also published data guidance for SIF xPress Roster.  To review the data guidance, please go to: https://www.a4l.org/Resources/Documents/SIF_xPress_Roster-Data_Guidance.xls

About the Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community

There is no other global community made up of educational policymakers, marketplace product and service providers and the customers they serve, collaborating daily to address real word learning information and resource issues.

The Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community, previously the SIF Association, is a unique, non-profit collaboration composed of schools, districts, local authorities, states, US and International Ministries of Education, software vendors and consultants who collectively address all aspects of learning information management and access to support learning.  The A4L Community is “Powered by SIF” Specifications as its major technical tool to allow for this management and access simply, securely and in a scalable, standard way regardless of the platform hosting those applications. The Access 4 Learning Community has united these education technology end users and providers in an unprecedented effort to give teachers more time to do what they do best: teach. For further information, visit http://www.A4L.org