InBloom in Connecticut?

Poking my way around Cheshire's K12 website I came across some newsletters written by the Curriculum Committee of the Board of Ed. The June 2013 newsletter says this:

...the platform to manage the new educator evaluation system was chosen by the SDE [State Department of Education] and is called Bloomboard. Bloomboard will allow the tracking of the various SEED components online, in a paperless environment... You can learn more about Bloomboard by going to: http://www.bloomboard.com/ 

So naturally I clicked through to BloomBoard and started poking around. On their FAQ page I came across this:

Can BloomBoard incorporate student data?

Yes! BloomBoard can include student data and evaluations to meet state or district reporting mandates, and to support better learning recommendations. We can import student data in .csv format or integrate directly with your Student Information System. In addition, BloomBoard supports student and parent climate/feedback conversations via our partnership with Panorama Education, a leading education survey provider to states and districts across the US.

The name felt so much like the inBloom I had been hearing about all over, and it felt so much like what I had read inBloom was doing, that I did a Google search for "bloomboard and inbloom". The top result led me to an inBloom page that says:

inBloom is proud to be partnering with the following innovators and creators of education technology products and services...

"BloomBoard is incredibly excited to partner with inBloom. Standardizing the complex data sets coming from disparate information systems across the education world will help scale innovation in profound ways.” - Jason Lange, CEO and Co-founder, BloomBoard, Inc.

Back to Google and further down the results list I found this:

"A freshly inked partnership in late 2012 with the emerging Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC), in which BloomBoard’s data architecture will be synched with that of the SLC"

That link is dead and the BloomBoard press release of July 18, 2012 is nowhere to be found now. I looked hard.

By the way, Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) was what inBloom was called before they switched names. And on that page it says:

Twenty-one education technology companies have already announced plans to develop applications that will work with inBloom through the service’s open application programming interface (API).

Not surprisingly, when you click on that link, it brings you to the inBloom page that mentions their partnership with BloomBoard that I referenced earlier.

Despite BloomBoard's FAQ that states "The two companies are entirely separate entities with no connection", BloomBoard's data architecture will be synced with that of inBloom. So it would seem that inBloom has infiltrated Connecticut.

Before you get all crazy by the prospect though, be sure to check in with your local Board of Ed, or even closer to home, with your children's teachers, to see what information they are actually inputting into BloomBoard. It may be that despite their ability to, teachers are not inputting kids' information in it at all.

And finally, for those of you who don't understand what an important issues this is, check out this list of the information on your kids that inBloom is telling their "partners" to set up their software to collect.