A Review of TIES Software: Technology Information Education Services

TIES, as the name suggests, ties together education and technology to provide school management, teaching faculty, students, and the academic community imaginatively designed and thoroughly comprehensive software applications created by educators who understand educational needs. An acronym for Technology Information Education Services, TIES was originally conceived and started more than forty years ago to provide school administrators, educators, and students required technology and resources.

The true value and worth of TIES can be judged by the fact that TIES, a joint power cooperative, is owned by thirty-eight Minnesota school districts. In addition, TIES member districts represent about four hundred schools. Furthermore, one-third of Minnesota's estimated student population of about 250,000 students are in TIES member districts.

In unity lies strength. A single school district cannot accomplish anything meaningful alone, but, if a group of districts join hands, the group can work wonders. Sharing technology products and services has multiple advantages including helping to enhance quality, to lower costs, and to optimize potential. TIES knows and understands the power of collaboration.

As full-fledged members of TIES, school districts save money while enjoying powerful education technology. Also, members are entitled to discounts on all TIES products and services. This means significant savings for schools that do not have monetary resources to fritter away on application servers or extra technical staff.

The facilities TIES offers fall into four broad categories with appropriate features:

Enterprise System Resources: TIES enterprise resources system enables effective data decision-making as data is drawn from different parts of the system. The features are student information, finance, HR, payroll, education performance management, records management, geographic information, portal, and SaaS.

Technical Resources: Technical resources include expert technical consulting, hardware sales for servers and workstations, software sales for office application requirements, and Internet services like web hosting and basic internet accessing facilities: all designed for education.

Instructional Resources: A full range of instructional resources is available for school administrative staffs, principals, teachers, clerical staff members, media professionals, and other education specialists. Instructional resources include workshops and seminars, conferences, online learning, InforMNs web-based resources, and web management tools (SchoolTIES and Urban Planet and Data-driven leadership).

Transportation: TIES provide budget-friendly and reliable transportation services for public, private, and charter schools across the nine-county Twin Cities metropolitan area. The features are Routing, VersaTrans and Edulog support.

The one noteworthy aspect is all TIES school management software applications provide unique levels of support and training for users, not to speak of full data conversion services.

Individual benchmarks to graduation and an online teaching resources tool are the two latest features added to TIES Student Information System. These two features are intended to help teachers, parents, and students monitor academic progress and aid improvement.

The benchmarks are automatically calculated for students in the Tests and Assessments reports of the SchoolView feature. This feature is going to be immensely useful to students and educators alike. The benchmarks will immediately spot when students are falling behind on test scores so that corrective action can be promptly taken. Parents can also access teaching resources through SchoolView to help students improve in areas where they need more work as indicated by low test scores.

Visit the TIES website to learn more.

Sources

• Ties: http://www.ties.k12.mn.us/