ATS Completes Another Successful Summer Deployment: Enhancing Kite® Suite with New Tools and Security Upgrades

Content Updated 2/24/2025

Summer is a busy time for the Achievement and Assessment Institute’s Assessment & Technology Solutions (ATS). School is out, which means months full of meetings, coding, implementations, and testing ATS software which culminates to a single full day of updates, ATS’s summer deployment.

ATS, one of eight strategic centers at AAI, designs, develops, and supports online educational assessments and software applications. The center’s flagship [LB1] software, the Kite® Suite, is a testing platform used by multiple state departments of education, including Kansas’, for their state assessments. The ATS team works year-round on managing and maintaining the Kite® Suite, recording feedback and fixing small issues as they appear, but summer and winter are when the work really picks up.

“As with any software company or any software creation company, we have major releases. We build them up all year so that in the summer we can change up the application so that there's not a lot of disruption,” said Lisa Braun, associate director of ATS. “While we can certainly do small fixes here and there, we save a lot up for the summer deployment.”

One of the ways ATS ensures the updates made align with what the users want is through the Kite Survey Solutions, a portal where teachers, administrators, and department of education employees can submit feedback. When the ATS team receives suggestions throughout the year for improvements or changes, the team discusses the suggestions when deciding what updates to implement.

“Our service desk has a survey that's sent at the end of every contact they have with our users, and a lot of our features come from those responses, many of them from teachers,” Braun said. “A lot of AAI staff also use our software applications, so they are also very much involved in the process.”

Mari Langas, the technology team leader at AAI’s Accessible Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Systems (ATLAS), works with the ATS team to manage ATLAS’s Dynamic Learning Maps® (DLM) assessments. DLM assessments are designed for students across the country with significant cognitive disabilities, and Langas works with ATS to ensure that ATLAS assessments are delivered to offer multiple ways for students to demonstrate their knowledge. This includes meeting regularly with state education departments and other stakeholders to figure out what updates and additions should be added.

“I meet with the states quite often, and they share features or enhancements that they themselves want to see or suggestions that they have received from their districts. Because it is a consortium, we hold brainstorming sessions and have them share these requests with the group to find an agreement as to whether these requests should be added to the DLM assessments,” Langas said. “Some states might find things high priority, and some think they're low priority. We work with them to see what the priorities are and then work with ATS to see where these updates could fit on the development schedule.”

A large chunk of the updates this summer involved security, but one of the new tools that was implemented in the Kite® Suite this year is the speech to text tool that helps students with disabilities fill out extended responses on tests.

“Before now, we had never have been able to implement this tool. Technology has really improved to the point where we finally have a Speech to Text tool that we thought would be appropriate for students,” Braun said.

After months of meetings and tests and planning, ATS employees gather for the final step: Uploading all the changes and updates to make them go live. ATS employees are spread out across the country, but for the summer deployment, out-of-state employees travel to Lawrence to be there in-person when the months of hard work pay off.

“It's always an awesome experience. We communicate a lot with people by Teams, and so to see them in person and slap them on the back and tell them how much you appreciate the work that they're doing and the collaboration that you experience with them is really great,” Braun said.

ATS team members were on site from early in the morning until the evening on July 25, implementing the updates slowly but surely. They enjoy breakfast and lunch together and try to make a day out of it. ATS Director Susan Dressler Martin said that when she joined ATS in 2016, the team was doing in person deployments, but with smaller groups. The center ramped up to the full team experience over the next couple of years, and she’s enjoyed seeing everyone together working towards a common goal.

“The planning done to balance the work across the team, ensuring it all gets completed efficiently, is amazing. We added an additional environment two years ago, adding more work for the team to complete, but they were able to integrate this into the plans and we were still done before 6 P.M. this year,” Martin said.

The day ended with no issues, and the programs are all running smoothly, which means ATS completed yet another successful summer deployment. As always, the team will continue to monitor and resolve small issues while also cataloging any suggestions or feedback they receive to prepare for the next deployment in winter.

“The deployments are just one of those great events that really shows all of the collaboration that we have,” Braun said. “I am excited to see what the next deployment looks like and how our team comes together again to get the work done.”

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Individuals or organizations interested in the Kite Suite should explore the tool's product page.