While we were at ISTE in Atlanta, we had a chance to check out LeanSprout. The company was at ISTE, fresho off of closing a whopping $4.2 million in Series A funding round, with Formation 8, Samsung Ventures and former Blackboard president, Justin Tan all pitching in.¹ That serves as quite an illustration of the importance of the company.

LeanSprout has built a platform that allows schools to digest and manipulate the massive amounts of data that they collect:

Virtually every school or district runs on something called a student information system (SIS). An SIS where student records are created, school schedules are organized, grades and attendance are stored, and much more. These systems are very good at ingesting lots and lots of data but they are notoriously difficult to pull data out of…LearnSprout solves these problems by leveraging a live connection with the SIS to read up-to-date data and transforms that data into easy-to-understand charts and graphs available to all site and district level administrators. Because LearnSprout has no limitation on the number of years of data it can store, educators can not only understand what’s happening now, but they can study the past to anticipate what might happen in the future.²

Further, along with their funding announcement, LearnSprout announced a new product, The College Readiness Dashboard:

The College Readiness Dashboard acts very much the same as their standard dashboard, but incorporates different filters and statistics:

With our new college readiness dashboard, counselors will have access to a live overview showing the total number of students in each grade level that are on-track, borderline or off-track for college. By leveraging a direct connection with a school or district’s SIS, LearnSprout is able to combine GPA, course completion and test scores to present a high-level view of a high school student body’s progress. Counselors can then drill down into a segment to work with individual students and log interventions. But this isn’t a one-size fits all solution… Each state university system typically maintains its own set of subject area requirements, test score thresholds and has a unique GPA calculation. To meet these unique needs, LearnSprout is preconfigured, eliminating setup and making it possible to track students based on the unique requirements of each state.³

During ISTE, we had a chance to speak with the LearnSprout team, and learned a but more about the company and their dashboards: