Frequently Asked Questions
The following are some of the most common questions that new or prospective users ask.
I have created an account with K12ambit - what do I do next?
A message will be sent to the e-mail address you have provided with all the information you need to access your account for the first time. After you have successfully signed in for the first time, you need to join a school.
We recommend that you join the "K12ambit Demo School" in order to be able to test-drive and learn about the many features offered by K12ambit.
Also, you can add your own schools by clicking on the "join a school" link. Select your state from the drop down list and you will see the names of schools that have already joined K12ambit. If your school appears in the list, simply click on the "join" link at the right-most column.
If you cannot find your school in the list and you have the school's information you can go ahead and add it to the list of schools. In order to add a school you need to click on the caption that says "Can't find your school in the list?". This will reveal the school information form that you need to fill out and save.
Do I need the approval of my school or parent organization to use K12ambit?
No. Some features in K12ambit were designed to allow even a small group of users to effectively use them without the need to rely on school-wide adoption. By using the "Invite" link in K12ambit you can let your friends and family into the K12ambit network. Once you invite someone to join, you can also add them to any of your personal Ambits. Not having your school or parent organization actively adopting K12ambit means that many of the useful features in it will not be useful to you and other parents in school.
Does K12ambit replace the web site of my school or parent organization?
Not necessarily. Most schools and parent organizations already maintain a web site that provides valuable information and opens a public window into the community and people behind it. With K12ambit your school or parent organization web site can continue serving as the main landing page.
Furthermore, K12ambit provides another useful tool, K12ambit-Bridge, which allows the web master to easily integrate dynamic content from K12ambit into the main web site. Effectively, K12ambit becomes the main method for publishing web content by the web master and other authorized users using a simple and powerful tool.
Why do you collect so much information about my family and I?
Keep in mind that you are not obliged to provide all your personal information (unless your school or parent organization mandate usage of K12ambit). Your personal information is needed if you wish to be part of meaningful small groups within and beyond your school community (we call it "Ambits"). For instance, your residence address is something you can share with a small group of trusted people from your school (neighbors, friends, etc.) Similarly, your contact information is useful to share with those who need to be in touch with you. Once again, through K12ambit you can manage your information and close networks very easily.
What do you do with my personal information?
First, we need to emphasize the main point in our Privacy Policy - we do not sell, transfer or expose any information to any third party.
Since the service is free to parents, we need to rely on advertisement to support the portal. At this point, we allow local businesses to sponsor your school or parent organization by displaying a simple sponsor link in the school section.
So, from your association to a given school, we derive the sponsors for this school and therefore display a sponsor's link to them when you view your school's information.
It is important to clarify that sponsors cannot access any personal information in K12ambit.
What is the business model behind K12ambit?
We need to emphasize that K12ambit will always remain free for parents. Other modules and features that the parent organization or school utilize are charged an annual usage fee based on the number of students in school. We are also looking into ways to monetize from local business sponsorship through unobtrusive advertisement. Our first goal is to create enough value in K12ambit and foster a significant parent community around it.
What our members are saying...
I have to admit that at first I was hesitant about using this service. However, once you start using it and understand the concept behind it, you realize its benefits and usefulness.
As a parent, you are in charge and in control of a lot of personal information which you need to enter only once and just keep updating from time to time. As a school, you have the ability to guard the community from people who are just snooping around and are not truly part of the community.