Edsby Reviews & Product Details

Edsby is a wonderful student information management system that continues to remain accessible to teachers, students, and parents alike. As a teacher, Edsby helps to maintain continuous access to current grades, feedback, general announcements, and file sharing so that everyday things such as PDFs, word documents, and videos can be uploaded to enhance student learning. It also facilitates confidential communication between the teacher with students and parents so that any missing work, concerns, requests for conferences, and anything else that may be necessary can be communicated in a timely manner. Overall, Edsby is an extremely helpful student information system that cuts down on paperwork while enhancing communication and feedback.

There is honestly nothing that I dislike about Edsby; they continue to update their capabilities and it is at the point right now where the system is just awesome!

Edsby is extremely easy to use and can be accessed via laptops and desktops as well as smart phones through the Edbsy app.

Within classrooms, teachers are responsible for many students; this can lead to an inordinate amount of paperwork that must be tracked. Also, student feedback, grades, And a myriad of other critical pieces of information are easily accessible by both students and parents so that the most up-to-date information is available. The availability of up-to-date information is absolutely critical in supporting students in their learning and engagement with school. Through the use of Edsby, communicating with students and parents, keeping track of grades, disseminating information, and sharing other pieces of critical information are done in an easy and quick manner. Furthermore, anything that is shared on Edsby is easily accessible again because it is captured it electronically for future reference

Edsby is an easy to use Learning Management System that mimics some of the common social networking graphical user interfaces that students and staff use. It has been evolving since it's inception and continues to add new features and capabilities.

We were an early adopter of the system and so worked with Edsby through some of the initial glitches and missing elements that were needed. While this worked well for the first year we were left out of the loop as they grew and gathered larger customers (Florida) and paid more attention to them. They've circled back and are working with us much more closely now. We are still working to get some things that we need in our district such as standards based grading, some controls on who can delete items in shared containers, and other things that we feel are necessary in a full LMS.

Any evaluation of an LMS must include participation by as many stakeholders as possible. Students should be included but you must not conduct an LMS review and selection without the participation of teaching staff, including those that currently use an LMS, those that are technically savvy, and those that have not used an LMS or struggle a little bit with technology. This overall and well rounded review committee will help you to identify the best solution for your district. In our reviews I do not include those staff that are heavily resistant to change, new things, technology, or shifts in their own instructional approach as they are going to bog down the process and you will not move them by including them. You can move the middle ground staff and you should use your super stars to facilitate that.

We are using Edsby to provide instruction, interaction, and classroom engagement beyond the brick and mortar school for our students. This is not our main system of record for grades or attendance but connectivity between Edsby and our SIS is possible (and we do some of this but are working on tighter integration).

I like that Edsby is constantly rolling out new features and is adding new customizations. With the addition of the PTI scheduler and the new attendance, calendar and LTI integration, Edsby has become a very full featured product. I look forward to the addition of OnSIS reporting and transcript printing as a way to make Edsby a truly full featured SIS replacement.

With some of the new features, they are not fully documented and they also break/disable currently working features. While support is able to help, there need to be more top-level support staff in the organization that can provide more direct support. I also don't like how the Dev team has so much control over the support process. Dev has frequently held up support tickets due to issues they are working on and this hinders my workflow. There is also infrequent communication around system features that are not currently working.

Make sure your SIS is supported and that you have clear goals in mind in regards to implementation with your staff, student, teachers, administrators and students. By having these clear goals, you will have a much easier time assigning responsibilities for the product.

The ability to provide better information access to our parents and also to allow a more seamless experience by bundling common information into the same portal. This allows our parents to see a fulsome picture of their child's performance and indicators.

For teachers, the gradebook and report writing are big wins. They make this paperwork efficient and for me that means more time for face-to-face time with students and more time to be creative with lessons. The ability to link websites, and documents to lessons and homework keeps resources handy to both me and a student.

Students benefit from knowing what is going on in class and their homework even when they miss class.

Lesson planning, homework, and how much information is shared with students and parents can be determined by schools. There are many possibilities for curriculum development and recording.

Updates happen overnight which for the most part is good - once and a while features change slightly with out notice (ie. Search will behave differently suddenly).

Be sure to invest in staff training and getting teachers excited about how it can help them be effective and efficient.

The effective and efficient creation of report cards. The first time through report writing was onerous as the customizations and process needed tweaking, however, since then benefits such as ease of the teacher tasks, and deadlines being met consistency are being seen.

Edsby's interface is easy to navigate, making it accessible for families that may not be tech savvy, but offers a ton of advanced functions that makes it an essential tool for our staff. Staying current and being innovative in education is a priority for our school, and Edsby fits in well with that model. They seek constant feedback from users and continue to add new features to meet our needs.

We are in a uniques position because we are a small school - we do not have another SMS to sync users and so we have to input new users manually. We've managed though - it's a small inconvenience compared to the value we get from using Edsby.

Edsby offers extensive functions and features to all users which can be intimidating at first, especially for teachers who may not have previous experience with an LMS. Don't be afraid to jump in and start small - once you get started you will quickly find the best ways to make it work for you Reach out to Edsby support - they offer the best in customer support I have experienced.

When we started our school, we were very small and so regular and effective communication with families was easy and became one of the aspects parents appreciated most about our school. As we grew it became harder to maintain the level of communication we established, but we quickly realized that this was integral to student success and something we wanted to continue to offer our families. Edsby made it possible for us to stay connected with families, and even helped us to improve communication amongst our whole school community.

Very easy to use and intuitive user interface. Report cards, alerts, current grade, attendance, are all right there in one location. We can see where a student is, if he or she was absent for a particular class, whether they have a family or medical alert, and how they are doing in class, with the click of a button.

No means of displaying community involvement hours. Students find this very frustrating - Edsby gathers info from Maplewood each night, but does not gather community involvement hours, which are mandatory for graduation.

A great tool with centralized info for students, teachers, parents, and school staff/admin.

Easy way to disseminate info to all student, or only a select group. Edsby eliminates version confusion, by having a single source for uploading classwork and other materials. It's also a very convenient means for parents to see their child's progress, with assignments and a summary of each class uploaded each day.

This program has made it so that teachers don't have to send weekly or monthly updates because parents have access to daily updates as to how their son or daughter is doing in the class. Students also have the ability to access information from class when they miss a class period. Parents appreciate the ability to communicate with staff and see a calendar of the is happening in classes concerning tests and assignments.

One of the biggest dislikes is not in the program, but the fact that parents don't log on and check the progress of their child. There is nothing in the program itself which causes great stress to our staff.

This is a valuable tool for any school who wants to increase communication with parents and students. It teaches students responsibility rather than accountability since they have everything they need.

This allows for more frequent communication with staff, students and parents. This has also take care of the issue of students missing a class or losing a handout, now they can upload anything which was handed out in class.

Massive functionality. The best integration of SIS and LMS anywhere. Customizable, but the power lies in the easy to use interface. Forget multiple clicks to do a simple task, Edsby is designed for the end users... but has the power in the back end for the administrators :-)

Support is iffy at best. Sometimes lightning fast, but at other times nothing... cricket. This is really the biggest need for improvement.

It is a different model of software - changes come fast and furious. The feature rich environment is easy to learn but requires a complete buy-in from the school district. Incremental implementation with Edsby is like pulling a cart with a thoroughbred racehorse...

There is no other LMS, SIS, portal system with this ease of use, low cost, low overhead, and massive functionality out there. If you're using another product you are wasting people's time and effort... From Portfolios to the Gradebook to Journals, Attendance, Groups, Messaging, Notifications... it really is a powerful school-focused productivity tool.

That everything is easy to use and intuitive, and all in the same place. Working from the admin level, I have experienced good support from the support team, and always prompt responses. The portfolio piece is one that we are continuing to experiment with.

That data is not easily found and analyzed. There seems to be a lot of analytics to work with, but I want to be able to easily pull it into a spreadsheet and manipulate it to get answers. This isn't as user-friendly as I would like for it to be.

I would suggest that this is a really good option for schools looking to put all of their data together in one place. If you want to have a one-stop shop for parents, students, and teachers to get their information, then this is a really great option. It is a difficult transition perhaps, but in one year a staff can be using it at a very high level - parent buy in may take some more time. I would be ready to expect a two or three year period for parents to become familiar with this, and perhaps longer. There are so many good things about it, but it does take time to get used to.

Communication with parents and students. We are using most of the functionality of the software to send messages, and communicate about assessments and class content with students.

Strongly aligned with our regulator's requirements. Cloud hosted. Easy interface. Synchronizes nightly with our SIS. SSO with Google and our AD. One stop shopping.

Features often rolled out with little warning. Not all new features are fully vetted and tested before being deployed. Non -customizable user roles. Hard to pull reports off of back end. Difficulty in creating parent accounts as they are currently listed as contacts and need to be invited to become parents. No way to export calendars from Edsby calendars to gCal.

Report cards are an iterative process. Limited documentation available for all features.

LMS, gradebook, attendance, report cards, parent-teacher conference scheduling, internal communication. Marked decrease in amount of internal emails.

It has great potential to help me and my children stay on top of assignment and grades.

Messaging is a complete mess!

All last year, I kept trying to contact teachers or administration at my child's middle school, and if I noticed an error in my wording or a typo, heaven forbid I try to go back and fix it! Once I went back, there was no returning to the end of the paragraph again. It was beyond frustrating. It was not user intuitive, either. It would take a while to figure out where to go to email a specific teacher, see homework assignments, and see grades. All of this is from the Edsby app, I'd like to add -- which is the only way I have been able to view Edsby. All on my iPhone.

My students seem to be able to log in and view what they need to view, but it's also near impossible to find certain assignments or instructions if they have to go back in the class thread a bit. I'm speaking of the class conversations.

I also wish more teachers were able to update it more frequently. More than half of the teachers don't update until the last minute (perhaps it is just as much of a pain on their end?). If it worked as well as it says it should, and if all the teachers would use it, it would be a great program.

I would research other programs to make sure they have a better communication system behind it. Again, being user intuitive is key!

Keeping parents informed and creating a hub for students to find assignments, gather more information, and contact teachers for both students and parents

I like the interface, it's very user-friendly. Similar to facebook so most people can figure it out quickly. I deal with hundreds of parents every day, most of whom are not very tech-savvy, and they all use Edsby without a problem.

There isn't much to say here. If I have something I dislike, I communicate with the customer service team and they fix it! They are amazing!

Do it! Edsby has been a game-changer for our school. I wish my daughters' school had it!

COMMUNICATION! Edsby makes communication so easy, with parents, staff, and students. Students are held more accountable for their work, and parents feel at ease knowing they can monitor their students' progress along the way.

I really like the ability to search for student names knowing only a portion of any part of their name. Knowing their grade during the search helps me greatly as well as the info panel giving me demographics.

I should have the ability to turn different panels off. Such as grades. I don't need to see that and would like the ability to turn panels off.

I'm using Edsby to look up student information quickly. I have other means to find the same information, but Edsby presents it in the same place for me. It saves me time, and most of the information is on one page. I'm not opening multiple applications or browsing via multiple pages to find what I need.

I like that I can easily post homework assignments and documents for my students to access.

I dislike that when I create a unit under the planner section, and I decided that the assignment is going to be Formative and not contribute the a student's average, Edsby lists this assignment as "ungraded" when that is not the case. Many times I assignment homework that is "read chapter 3" or "print this worksheet"." These assignments do not receive a letter grade and, therefore, should not be listed as "ungraded."

I also have issues with creating and assigning a test for my students to take on Edsby:

1. I have to keep opening and reopening the test for students who happen to be absent on the day of the test. This creates extra, unnecessarily columns in my gradebook and confuses my students.

2. When students are asked to answer a short answer, the is essentially impossible and I have to go back and recheck each response because if they miss a punctuation mark, spell something wrong, or even don't capitalize something, or write it word for word exactly, it marks the answer as wrong. It is my understanding that this was designed to make grading easier and faster when it does not do this.

Finally, I dislike the way there is not an option to undo something when entering grades in the gradebook.

Really make sure you receive a training and then subsequent training for help.

I use it for my classroom and not for a business. IIt also can be very slow around grading times.

Capability to share classroom info and communicate with parents

Interface is not as user-friendly as some other LMS being used by colleagues, and there is no integration of superior features offered by G Classroom (I.e. Doctapus, Goobric, commenting / correction features of G Docs, etc)

I would tell them to try it, because I believe that it holds a lot of potential to help school communities communicate important information better, and I hope that with more feedback from real classroom teachers, the LMS and assessment features can be improved

None as of yet. Still waiting for complete roll-out of all features at all schools.

There are so many tools and functionalities in Edsby. I am still discovering many of them, but everything has purpose and use for an educator.

On the mobile app there are no notifications.

Communication with parents and students is seamless. If I am making notes about a student's progress on their profile, it is easy to send their parent a message right afterward.

It allows teachers to communicate grades and concerns to parents with general ease.

The communication tools (for parents to email teachers, etc.) are difficult to find at first, and then when you do, they are not as fluid as email-only apps or programs.

Be aware that its various screens sometimes take time to load.

Once parents know how to use it, they generally are satisfied with the level of communication it provides. It also will show if a teacher is being proficient with assessment.

Edsby have been excellent partners with us as we aim to create our online community and internal assessment database. They are quick to respond to our every need and have been thus far able to fulfill all of our requests.

The functionality of the app could be improved to greater mirror the desktop version.

They will work closely with you to customize the site to your needs.

We have realized that paperwork has been reduced and that communication is quick and seamless between many stakeholders. Efficiency has improved.

The wall is fantastic. It allows me to push information, links and attachments. The format is familiar to teachers parents and students.

Some of the aspects of the weighting system in the gradebook are not as transparent as I would like.

I use it exclusively for education and cant really comment on buisiness.

This all in one learning management system is an excellent way to connect all aspects of school life. It is K-12 friendly and allows for the schiil community to be involved in the success of all involved.

The system lacks some flexibility in the view options for the calender/planner, so it's challenging to use as it isn't very flexible.

Jump in from the beginning and get everyone onboard by selling them the time they will save and the benefits of whole school platforms that work with you.

Edsby allows us to communicate easily and consistently across all avenues of the school. We all benefit from using the same system and exploring it together. The learning curve is excellent and the support is fantastic.

The interface is quite easy to navigate and has a Facebook-like feel to it. It integrates relatively well with our SIS.

Edsby needs more time to mature into a full fledged LMS. Certain functionalities like discussion boards and other online learning tools are absent.

Be diligent and do a needs analysis with all related departments and evaluate all other LMSes.

Edsby has helped us to amalgamate and integrate certain systems that were previously disparate. This has streamlined certain processed and made things simpler to manage.

I love the portfolio feature. It is a great way to share a snapshot of what the student is doing with other teachers, administrators, and parents.

I also love that it gives the students a safe social media introduction.

I can't seem to create rubrics.

Some documentation is missing.

The support I have received is second to none. All issues are addressed same day.

It allows effective communication with parents and allows us to keep all paperwork online!

Edsby is awesome not only for individual and class-wide tracking, but also for collaboration between educators and staff members. Such a versatile tool!

The only downside I've noticed so far is that the program can sometimes be glitchy, but that would happen with anything - nothing else!

We have realized that transparency and constant communication is key. It allows every member of the team to be in the know and support a student as effectively as possible.

This is a very capable product. It has strengths in data management for sure.

Some of the UX Design is cluttered and non-intuitive. With the userbase of the application having such a wide range of navigational skills, it could use some work making pathways clearer.

We've begun to leverage the home - school communication in Edsby after having worked with secondary report cards and gradebook.

Ease of use, comprehensive, everything in one place.

Need to allow to message students only without parents

Only the above issue

Edsby is "one-stop shopping" for organizing your classes. Communicate with students, parents, and colleagues; organize assignments and grades; create groups for clubs and teams; post documents for student use.

Report card feature is still a little basic.

Edsby is an excellent tool for parents to check up on their students marks and homework completion. It also allows me to post work online for students who are absent.

The cohesion across the school and the ease of using it with google drive

There were lots of places to do similar things so it sometimes seemed that there was quite a bit of overlap and therefore it took a while to work out the most streamlined way to do things

Absolutely

It enables staff and parents to stay in touch in a much more efficient way

I love the integration with our current student information system and Edsby's willingness to work with us to find solutions to our integration gaps.

The lack of customization within our own environment which is completely understandable when dealing with a product of this size.

Try it out for yourself

We are solving district wide gradebook issues as well as finding solutions to ministry requirements.

Edsby is like Facebook for teachers. I like how everything is all together and you get a snapshot of what's going on in your 'feed'

I dislike how students don't interact with us through the application but I believe that is something that the school can regulate and choose.

I think it is so easy to use, and totally worth it for a teachers.

Like I said it keep everything all together so there is no switching between programs for things like inputting marks, attendance, groups.

That you can send and receive messages to and from the teacher and you can review daily work that is done in class.

At times the pages won't up load. I would blank out

If it's available to you and you're not using it then you are wasting your time.

The ease of communicating with the teacher

We like the ability for students and parents to be able to see what is happening at school on a daily basis.

It doesn't mesh with Google Docs as well as we would like it to.

Benefits include access for our teachers from anywhere.

Attendance is easy as well.

Easy access to school information. App to access from anywhere

As a school secreatary sending out news letters/ bulletins, I would like to also receive what parents get in order to review

Sending news letters and communication bulletins in a very efficient manner.

Easy to use UI with very powerful tools.

Lots of tools means a higher learning curve for staff who wish to use it

Streamline communication from a parent to teacher level along with realtime information of student progress

Gradebook is easy to use, the river is nice.

Student interface could be improved.

Interface for teachers too crowded.

More functionality present - attendance in particular

Better integration with Google Drive.

Centralized point for lessons, interaction, blog, etc