Back to school 2019 hot AWS EdStart startups: School administration technology edition

AWS EdStart members are pushing the limits in education by creating products and solutions to improve school administration. In honor of back to school season, we are featuring companies who are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build solutions that help educational institutions improve operations.

Read on to learn about these AWS EdStart EdTechs:

Hive Digital Minds

Hive Digital Minds was created to help school leaders with their communication and parent engagement strategies. Their core product SchoolBzz is a software as a service (SaaS) platform that simplifies how information is shared with families – eliminating teacher websites, reducing email, and replacing messaging apps. SchoolBzz integrates with existing learning management systems like Schoology and Google Classroom, making it easier for parents to stay connected and support their children outside the classroom.

“Whenever a new school joins SchoolBzz, we support all the administrators, educators, parents, and guardians – ensuring everyone is set up and connected in their SchoolBzz community. At the beginning of every school year, this means thousands of new users access our SchoolBzz platform in a very short time period. Thanks to solutions like Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3, our engineering team quickly and gracefully responds to demand— so we can create a positive experience for all users in SchoolBzz.”

– Jennifer Larson, CEO Hive Digital Minds

Mytaptrack

mytaptrack is a click-touch button (similar to an Amazon Dash button) used by students with special needs that connects with an online platform used to track symptoms and behaviors. The system sends real-time alerts to a student’s selected educators, parents, and doctors. Mytaptrack meets FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) standards for the safe handling of educational and healthcare data.

“AWS is allowing mytaptrack to provide highly secure HIPAA and FERPA compliant products and services at a fraction of the price it would cost for us to build it ourselves. With AWS, we were able to put together our proof of concept and rapidly get real-world product engagement with an operating cost of less than $200 a month in our initial startup stages. Also, mytaptrack holds itself to the highest security standards, and AWS has made it easy for us to partner with the best when it comes to security and intrusion monitoring – Logicworks. They are on top of our architecture, providing 24/7 security monitoring of the system, feedback about security concerns, and an advanced set of knowledge and experiences in data protection.”

– Nikody Keating, CEO and Founder, mytaptrack

Omniscol

Creating school timetables (known by students as class schedules) can be complicated and confusing with so many factors and inputs impacting the final timetable. For K12 timetables, it is even more complex, with a lot of lessons to fit inside a few repeating days. Omniscol helps define lessons and all the supplementary constraints, and then their algorithm calculates the best possible timetable in a few minutes. Once a timetable is generated and optimized, it can be changed easily without causing a conflict, for reasons like classroom space being unavailable or a teacher being replaced.

Omniscol is online and can be integrated with any other software such as MIS/SMS or other in-house tools. The program is available for various levels of education and in 11 languages for countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

“No failure has been recorded since Omniscol migrated to AWS. This is important as schools want reliable access — even though Omniscol supports offline, time management is important for school administration. AWS is also providing a range of tools rather easy to deal with, and as we use a multi-cloud architecture. AWS is the best available tool for a startup. And of course, the AWS team is awesome and helps us with advice, contacts, promotion, and credits.”

– Gilles Blanc, CEO and Co-founder, Omniscol

Reculta

Reculta, which started in January 2017, provides SaaS-based products for higher education that simplify campus placements and recruitment, allowing schools to access data-driven insights. To build Reculta into a one-stop solution for schools and recruiters, they are adding more partners (product and service providers) on the platform.

“AWS is a core enabler for us to provide our services to end users. So far, we have been able to deploy our solution at more than 30 institutions and help place more than 7,500 students at these institutions. We received results via AWS chatbot monitoring systems and were able to host our front-end code frugally using AWS serverless services.”

– Utsav Bhattacharjee, Co-founder and Head of Business Development and Partnerships, Reculta

AWS EdStart recently launched the Innovators Tier, a new feature designed to support the EdTech startups in the earliest stages. AWS EdStart Innovators Tier provides startups with resources and exposure to a large community of EdTech builders, leaders, and fellow entrepreneurs. EdTech startups who participate in the program can be granted AWS Promotional Credits that allow them to explore AWS technology and build the foundation for their solution. Learn more by checking out the AWS EdStart website.