 |
After the discussions about EPIC at LKSW2017 I have been writing back and forth and finally, have some firm news to report.
My contacts are MaryAnn (Support) & Tahleen (Sales & Marketing), these are the issues we have resolved.
1. Concerns over international schools signing up when they state that it is only available to educators in USA, Australia, Canada, Great Britain and NZ.
2. How to handle 1:1 devices
Regarding item 1 – I asked
“Can I tell my Network to write to Epic if they want to use the product and request an exception for access? That way you can track who wants it and why. My networks are International School Library Connection and International Schools Libraries Network.
If they wrote introducing themselves and requesting access you would know that they are genuine users who want to respect your terms and conditions and promote personal subscriptions- most of these people are American, Canadian, Australian or British teachers working in schools that serve students of those nationalities and delivering one of those countries curriculums.”
and MaryAnne replied
“We would be happy to review each request that is sent to Epic! directly and I’ll be sure to alert my team as well. “
So, they are aware and I believe that if you introduce yourselves theynwill answer favourably. If you have a problem please let me know and I will follow-up.
Regarding item 2 – the answer was
“When an educator signs out of the app, students will not have access to the app until their teacher signs back into the app. All the student profiles are contained within the educator account and students would need to access their profile through the educator account. Students have no way of accessing their profile unless the educator is already signed or logged into the Epic! app. If a student is at home attempting to log into their profile without the educator being signed in on their device, the student would not be able to access their student profile.”
Therefore, as long as the devices are signed out of the teachers account before leaving school, students can use EPIC on their 1:1 devices. This would mean that the teacher would need to sign everyone in (we do this – the kids put in the teacher’s email and we quickly scoot around putting in the password) or the teacher could change the password after they had signed out so that each time they use it they input a different password.
My feeling is that EPIC are very happy to work with us as long as we promote their product to parents. It is a great product, so personally, I don’t find this hard to do. I am building some answers to FAQ at our school at http://ask.uwcsea.edu.sg/search/?t=0&q=epic
– please feel free to submit any questions that you might have as to how we use EPIC there as it will help me to build my database.
Happy reading – Barb