TalkingPoints scales student impact with AWS and RosterStream by Ednition

TalkingPoints, a nonprofit organization, is transforming how schools build strong, effective relationships with families through accessible, two-way communication in more than 150 languages. To scale their platform and better support schools and families across the US, TalkingPoints turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Ednition—a leader in edtech rostering and interoperability and AWS Partner—to improve how it ingests and acts on student data from school systems.

Together, they enhanced TalkingPoints’ real-time, secure infrastructure—enabling districts to communicate quickly and effectively with families and guide best-practice engagement, while empowering educators to take timely, personalized action to support students and improve outcomes.

In this post, we explore how TalkingPoints partnered with AWS and Ednition to build a real-time, scalable infrastructure that powers more proactive communication between schools and families.

Scaling data infrastructure for student impact

Founded by Heejae Lim, TalkingPoints was born out of her experience as an immigrant and English learner. The platform was designed to remove language and technology barriers between educators and multilingual families, so every student can receive the support they need to thrive.

As the organization expanded, it became clear that scaling its infrastructure to access school system data, particularly attendance and rostering information, would be crucial to unlocking new capabilities and partnering with families in real time.

“We knew we needed access to attendance and rostering data in real time to support students more proactively,” said Stephanie Kaufman, head of product at TalkingPoints. “But we didn’t want to build that infrastructure ourselves. That’s not our core mission.”

Previous solutions were expensive or incomplete. TalkingPoints sought a more cost-effective, flexible, and standards-based approach—one that didn’t require building entirely new infrastructure in-house or relying on proprietary technology.

Real-time integrations built with AWS and Ednition

To solve this challenge, TalkingPoints partnered with Ednition, an AWS Partner that helps edtech organizations streamline SIS integrations and data infrastructure. Using Ednition’s RosterStream platform, they implemented a real-time data pipeline that can ingest SIS data from districts across the country using open standards like 1EdTech’s OneRoster and EdFi’s Extended Data Domains.

At the core of this solution is Amazon Kinesis, which enables TalkingPoints to stream both high-volume attendance data and lower-volume rostering data into their systems—keeping data synchronized, current, and actionable.

“Ednition helped us land on Kinesis as the right fit,” said Kaufman. “It gave us the flexibility to scale and stream exactly the type of data we needed, when we needed it.”

The architecture now delivers data to two key destinations:

• An application database powering real-time communication features
• A secure data environment used for analytics and district-facing dashboards

With access to up-to-the-minute data, TalkingPoints can now automatically trigger personalized messages, identify attendance trends, and support districts in proactive and early intervention to improve attendance outcomes.

“If a student misses two days of school in a week, we can instantly notify the family with helpful resources,” said Kaufman. “We’re giving partners the tools to act before absenteeism becomes a crisis.”

Faster launches, better performance, and improved student outcomes

By partnering with Ednition and AWS, TalkingPoints avoided the time and resource costs of building its own data ingestion infrastructure. Instead of dedicating months and multiple engineers to an internal solution, they launched a working MVP in just eight weeks. The solution delivered results, including:

• Faster onboarding for district partners
• Secure, real-time data ingestion
• Improved accuracy and timeliness of messages sent to families
• Scalable infrastructure to support millions of users

“This helped us accelerate our work supporting students,” said Kristie Werner, TalkingPoints director of product marketing. “We’ve improved the experience for both families and partners, and opened the door to new features and innovations.”

Supporting future growth and innovation

Looking ahead, TalkingPoints is expanding its capabilities to help schools improve student attendance, engage families more meaningfully, and ultimately drive better outcomes.

With their AWS infrastructure and Ednition supporting real-time district integrations, the nonprofit is well-positioned to scale its impact.

“As a nonprofit, anything that helps us move faster and better support kids makes a difference. AWS and Ednition help us focus on what we do best—helping schools and families support their children’s success,” said Werner.

Learn how AWS helps EdTechs build, deploy, and scale solutions that help students and educators succeed or contact us today.