School Loop Launches Open APIs for Web System
Education technology developer School Loop is rolling out open APIs called OpenLoop to help districts exchange data between School Loop subsystems.
School Loop is a Web system for K-12 schools that provides content management capabilities, WYSIWYG editing, secure hosting, digital lockers, and other portal features. It includes pre-designed templates, rights management, support for teacher sites, electronic commerce features, news publishing, and reporting, among other features.
OpenLoop provides Web-based services to help district developers and software vendors connect to data housed within the School Loop system. The first such service released by School Loop is called OpenLoop Gradebook API. It lets gradebook and assessment systems pull data--such as rosters and assignments--from School Loop and write scores into the School Loop gradebook for display to parents, teachers, students, and other stakeholders.
According to the company, "The OpenLoop API is implemented through a secure http Web-service. The Web-service is a simple but powerful REST-based implementation, meaning no extra message layering--such as SOAP--is required. Downloading School Loop rosters and gradebooks, and posting grades back to the gradebook, is as easy as querying or posting to a Web page. The password-protected XML interface allows automated sharing of all gradebook details, including courses, assignments and assignment categories, grades, grade scales and custom grade definitions, rosters, and period and section details, providing vendors with an extremely flexible, secure, and easy-to-implement interface with the School Loop Gradebook."
The OpenLoop Gradebook API is available now. Further information can be found here.