Last Modified: July 14, 2021
The Summit Learning Program helps schools implement personalized learning for students in grades 4 through 12. Schools that sign up for the Program (“Partner Schools”) receive access to, among other things, (1) standards-aligned, customizable curricula developed by teachers and educational experts, (2) professional development for educators, (3) ongoing support, and (4) an online tool (“Summit Learning Platform”) that supports the learning experience for the students, teachers, and families that the Partner School serves. The Program is free to any U.S. school.
As with all modern online tools, we work with “Service Providers” to operate, protect, and improve the Summit Learning Platform. These trusted vendors help us and Partner Schools with a variety of tasks, ranging from web hosting and analytics to software engineering and managing technical support tickets. In order to enable our Service Providers to perform these functions we may need to provide them with access to personally identifiable user (student, teacher, and parent) information stored in the systems for Summit Learning Program. For example, we securely store Summit Learning Platform data in databases managed by Amazon Web Services.
We are responsible for making sure these vendors are trustworthy and we take this responsibility seriously. First, we apply the following controls to any Service Provider that may have access to personal information as part of their work for us:
- We contractually prohibit these Service Providers from selling personal information and require them to implement reasonable and robust privacy security controls.
- We take steps to limit the Service Provider’s access to only the information it needs to provide services to us.
- Where possible, we will use privacy-protective measures to minimize information shared with Service Providers or other Summit Learning Platform integrations (e.g. embedded content), such as masking personal identifiers like student or teacher names.
Second, we want to be transparent about who we may need to share personally identifying information with as part of operating the Summit Learning Platform, and so have provided the list of who we work with below, including what data we share with them or they provide to us, the services they provide for Summit Learning, and links to their respective privacy policies.
Finally, please note a few types of third-party services that we have not added to this list:
- Teachers may include links out to third-party content, such as Encyclopedia Britannica, as part of curriculum materials they create for the Summit Learning Platform. These websites open in a separate browser window and are not included in the list below.
- Like any other organization, we use “IT” business services such as Gmail, Salesforce, and Slack to operate our organization. These services may incidentally contain personal information (e.g., email address or contact handle) and we apply the Service Provider restrictions described above, but have not included a detailed list of these IT business services below.
- Some curriculum content embedded into the Summit Learning Platform may collect IP addresses and basic browser information in order to display properly (e.g. PhET, a physics simulation tool). We list a sample of these content providers below, but have not included a complete list.
If you have any questions, please contact us at privacy@summitlearning.org. You can also learn more in the Summit Learning Privacy Policy.
Technical Service Providers
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Name of Service Provider with Link to Privacy Policy |
Service |
Details |
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Hosts databases and servers that power and back up the Summit Learning Platform. |
We store the full Summit Learning Platform content and traffic data on AWS servers (all personal information written to disk is encrypted). |
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Project management tool used for tracking projects and assigning tasks internally. |
Asana may receive personal information sent in the course of debugging errors on the Summit Learning Platform or responding to school requests for specific data pulls or fixing certain bugs. |
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Provides software engineering, technical, and operational support for the Summit Learning Platform. |
Authorized CZI staff have access to the full Summit Learning Platform content and traffic data in the course of providing engineering, technical, and operational support to the Summit Learning Platform. You can learn more about our partnership with CZI at this FAQ: [https://help.summitlearning.org/hc/en-us/articles/360000818708-How-do-Summit-and-the-Chan-Zuckerberg-Initiative-collaborate-to-protect-student-information-].
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Online appointment scheduling with members of our support and success teams |
Calendly is a calendar add-on that receives user emails when users sign up for appointments. |
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For schools that choose to enable it, Clever integrates with the school’s student information system (SIS) and sends to the Summit Learning Platform certain information to automatically configure user accounts and class schedules. |
School admins choose what data they want Clever to share with the Summit Learning Platform. Clever then sends to the Summit Learning Platform the selected information, which may include the school’s rosters (names, emails, and school persistent identifiers for teachers and students), course lists, section lists, and assignments of students and teachers to sections. * Note: we do not share personal information back to Clever. |
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Online calculator integrated into the Summit Learning Platform |
Desmos may collect a user’s IP address in order to provide this calculator service |
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Provides single-sign-on (SSO) authentication for Summit Learning Platform users, hosts student coursework and curriculum content. |
For SSO, Google sends the Summit Learning Platform authentication tokens and email addresses, but not account passwords. Students and teachers may also complete, review, and store work inside Google Docs. |
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Hosts the web servers for the Summit Learning Platform. |
The full Summit Learning Platform content and traffic data is stored with Heroku. |
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Runs various data reports on data previously captured in the Summit Learning Platform uploaded data, and data from third-party integrations so we can improve the tool and provide external users actionable metrics via the school data dashboard. |
Looker has access to the full Summit Learning Platform content and traffic data in our data warehouse (Snowflake) in order to run data reports. All connections between Looker and Snowflake are encrypted. | |
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Enables customer support for the Summit Learning Platform to evaluate the quality of their responses to requests from teachers and parents. |
Through Zendesk, MaestroQA receives the email addresses of individuals submitting requests, the content of the requests itself (e.g. bug reports, any other help center request, and data pull requests from teachers and schools), including attachments. |
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Provides applied math lesson plans around interesting real world concepts. |
Receives teachers’ names and email addresses from the Summit Learning Platform so that teachers may have Mathalicious accounts and use the content service for their students. |
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(Azure AD Seamless Single Sign-On) |
Provides single-sign-on (SSO) authentication for users and hosts student coursework and curriculum content. |
For SSO, Microsoft sends the Summit Learning Platform an authentication token and email addresses, but not account passwords. Students and teachers may also complete, review, and store work inside Office 365. |
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Runs various data reports on data previously captured in the Summit Learning Platform, uploaded data, and data from third party integrations so we can improve the tool. |
Periscope has access to the full Summit Learning Platform content and traffic data in our data warehouse (Snowflake) in order to run data reports. All connections between Periscope and Snowflake are encrypted. |
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Pushes notifications to a user’s web browser to indicate a status change (vs. the web browser asking a server if anything is new). |
Pusher may obtain a user’s IP address when a browser connects with it. It will also receive opaque identifiers that present various status changes or user IDs. For example, when a student requests to take an assessment, the status change is “pushed” to the teacher’s web browser so the Summit Learning Platform can alert the teacher and the teacher can approve the student’s request. |
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Houses and tracks partnership agreements, points of contact and other coordination information. |
Salesforce receives the names, email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers of Summit Learning Platform Partner School district personnel and points of contact related to agreements and program communications. |
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Email service for sending emails to users (parents only and not students). |
SendGrid receives names and email addresses of parent users of the Summit Learning Platform and the content of the emails. |
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Facilitates communication between teams working on the Summit Learning Platform. |
Slack may receive and share personal information incidentally sent in the course of communications between Summit Learning Platform team members, including engineers, teacher support teams, and Summit Learning mentors. |
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Serves as a data warehouse that powers the Summit Learning Platform. |
The full Summit Learning Platform content and off-Platform data collected from schools is stored on Snowflake’s servers (data is always encrypted). |
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Create and send surveys for educators, and anonymously for students, with the intent of improving the Summit Learning Platform through teacher feedback. |
SurveyMonkey receives the email addresses of educators submitting feedback, the content of the survey feedback requests (e.g. improvements, feature requests and suggestions etc.), and the responses provided. |
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Sends SMS text messages to parents (not students). |
Twilio receives parents’ names, phone numbers, and the content of the SMS messages. |
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Enables customer support for the Summit Learning Platform in response to requests from teachers and parents and supports management of Help Center content. |
Zendesk receives the email addresses of individuals submitting requests, the content of the requests itself (e.g. bug reports, any other help center request, and data pull requests from teachers and schools), and the results of data pulls sent back to teachers when requested. |
Sample Summit Learning Platform embedded content providers
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Name of Service Provider with Link to Privacy Policy |
Service |
Details |
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Provides math assessments for the Summit Learning Platform. |
Summit Learning Platform masks personal identifiers shared with Learnosity so that teachers and students can take math assessments inside the Summit Learning Platform without giving Learnosity the ability to identify any individuals. |
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JavaScript display engine that allows the Summit Learning Platform to display math equations. |
MathJax may collect a user’s IP address in order to provide this math equation display service. |
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Non-profit project from the University of Colorado that provides physics and math simulations embedded into the Summit Learning Platform. |
PhET may collect a user’s IP address in order to provide these physics and math simulation tools. |
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Provides an asynchronous learning interface (LMS) for teachers and school leaders. |
Receives teachers’ names and email addresses from the Summit Learning platform to create Thought Industries accounts, enabling teachers to access professional development content created by the Summit Learning Professional Learning team. |
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For embedding videos for student assignments on the Summit Learning Platform. |
Summit Learning Platform has enabled “privacy enhanced mode,” which means YouTube videos can be embedded without using cookies that allow YouTube to track viewing behavior. |
NOTE: This list of Summit Learning Platform embedded content providers is not intended to be a comprehensive list.