Home Base North Carolina’s Instructional Improvement (IIS)
and Student Information System (SIS) Minimum
End-User Technical Requirements
Home Base is the new, statewide instructional improvement system (IIS) and student information
system (SIS) for teachers, students, parents, and administrators (“end-users”). Implementation of the
SIS functions and partial IIS functions will begin in school year 2013-14.
Home Base will deliver its application functionality, including end-of-course and end-of-grade
assessments, to end-users through web portals via all major HTML5-compatible web browsers.
The Home Base applications will be highly scalable to support all teachers, students, parents, and
administrators. However, end-user system performance will be impacted by how the end-user
devices are configured and the robustness of the network through which the end-user device
connects to the Internet. Because the end-user devices and network are key elements to the
success of Home Base, the Home Base team has developed minimum technical requirements to
ensure end-users experience satisfactory system performance when using Home Base.
The following table provides high-level technical requirements for the Home Base applications. In
some cases, the technical requirements are not yet known. In addition, we anticipate that some free,
specialized software may be required for Home Base end-users who are involved with uploading
curriculum and for those end-users involved with administering and scoring classroom assessments.
Once all the necessary NCDPI contracts with the vendors are signed, the Home Base Team will
work with the vendors to finalize and communicate minimum system requirements to LEAs and
Charter Schools. These requirements will be developed based on the vendors’ experiences with
similar implementations and from the LEA and Charter school technology surveys and subsequent
analysis that were performed by NC Education Cloud and MCNC staff.
TECHNOLOGY AREA
Browsers
Browser Plug-Ins (no charge)
Devices/ Operating Systems
LAN/ WLAN
Network Bandwidth
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS/ COMMENTS
Requirements: Current or two back releases of browsers such as Internet
Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome
Requirements: For print-formatted content such as student profiles and
Integration with student response “clickers”
 Adobe PDF Reader 8.0+
 Microsoft Silverlight 3.0+
Requirements: Microsoft Windows desktop or laptop (with at least XP,
service pack 3), Mac OS desktop or laptop (v. 10.4.4+), Apple iOS
devices (v.6+), Android devices (v.4+), Chrome OS devices (v19+), some
E-readers and other devices
Requirements: To be established
Requirements: To be established
What LEAs and Schools can do to prepare for Home Base:
 Ensure that LEAs, Charters, and all schools have optimized network routers and LANs to
maximize bandwidth at each school and classroom.
 Ensure that high-capacity wireless networks are available at each school and have sufficient
coverage to reach all classrooms in which Home Base will be used.
 Ensure that students have access to supported Internet-enabled devices to access Home Base.
 Ensure that devices are equipped with mainstream browsers (current release preferred, but
no older than two releases back).
For more information, please visit our website at http://www.ncpublicschools.org/homebase/ or
email us at Home_Base_READY@dpi.nc.gov.