Data Privacy: Key Features for Safeguarding Student Data

Educational institutions store vast amounts of sensitive student data making them a frequent target for cyberattacks. Threats to student data privacy are tremendous and reports of school system data breaches on the rise. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reports that, on average, K-12 schools experience more than one cyber incident per school day.

According to CoSN’s 2024 State of EdTech Leadership Report, cybersecurity and data privacy remains a top concern for edtech leaders, with 99% of districts taking measures to improve protections. While the implementation of best practices has increased over the past years, mitigating student data privacy risks continues to be a significantly time-consuming and costly task for school districts. That’s why Lightspeed Systems continues to invest in simple, effective tools and features to enhance school security, compliance, and data privacy strategies.

Leverage key features of Lightspeed Digital Insight to fortify student data privacy

Districts must be vigilant about protecting data privacy. However, managing an ever-expanding number of edtech apps, as well as their constantly changing privacy policies, can be an administrative nightmare and strain already limited resources. By leveraging key features in Lightspeed Digital Insight, IT leaders can streamline manual processes and more efficiently protect valuable student data.

Lightspeed Digital Insight enables district leaders to:

1. Ensure complete visibility into all apps being used

To ensure student data privacy, it is crucial that districts have real-time visibility into all apps in usage within their edtech environment. With well-meaning educators seeking tools that help students, it is becoming harder and more time-consuming for IT leaders to get a comprehensive picture of all apps, let alone how each and every edtech tool is using data and whether it follows district privacy guidelines.

Lightspeed Digital Insight offers the most complete picture of edtech usage on the market, including quick visibility into “rogue” unapproved apps and usage across all devices and OS. With a comprehensive view of app use, district IT leaders can easily analyze compliance with district approval processes and proactively track privacy policy changes. Not only does this save valuable time, but it also makes it easier for districts to ensure compliance—at all times.

2. Identify trustworthy apps and tools

According to our 2024 EdTech App Report, the average school district has more than 2,000 edtech applications in use during the school year. Given the tremendous number of edtech apps in use, vetting apps for privacy compliance has become a significantly cumbersome task for IT departments.

However, with Lightspeed Digital Insight, IT leaders can assess third-party app privacy risks more efficiently thanks to integrations with 1EdTech’s TrustEd Apps Program and the Student Data Privacy Consortium (SDPC). These integrations enable present validation badges signifying compliance with key privacy regulations such as GDPR, FERPA, and COPPA right in the Digital Insight app detail page. These tools help districts quickly determine which apps to approve, renew, or further investigate for data privacy risk. In fact, with Digital Insight, IT leaders report saving one hour per application reviewed.

3. Expedite privacy policy review

Unfortunately, edtech data privacy management is not limited to an initial vetting process. Apps are constantly updating their privacy policies, and districts must continuously ensure they are in compliance with district and state policies. According to our EdTech App Report, 91% of school apps in use had data privacy changes with a median of 3 changes per year, creating a lot of administrative overhead for IT departments.

Lightspeed Digital Insight streamlines this ongoing privacy policy management with real-time policy scanning, including notifications of policy changes, highlighted changes, and a before-and-after view so leaders can proactively protect students’ personally identifiable information (PII) from getting into the wrong hands. This feature saves administrators time while ensuring their policies remain compliant and their data privacy practices remain secure.

4. Stay vigilant with ongoing data privacy compliance

Student data privacy is a daily priority for district IT leaders. As cyberattacks on K-12 increase and parental concerns grow, districts must stay on top of all app activity to safeguard valuable student data. Lightspeed Digital Insight simplifies this daily management with a Student Data Privacy Dashboard that highlights potential student data privacy concerns that may require action. This dashboard enables IT leaders to quickly view new app activity on their networks, unapproved apps that may be gathering student PII and/or be out of compliance with district, state, or local privacy policies, and privacy policies have been updated, with before-and-after highlighted changes.

Lightspeed Digital Insight equips IT leaders with tools that make data privacy management simpler, more efficient, and less time-consuming. Check out our on-demand videos to learn more about these features.