Skyward School Management

Kommentare: Overall my experience has been great. Without Skyward I would not be able to do my job as a school secretary and I am glad that so many schools are using. It does have a daunting learning curve but it's nothing that can't be overcome with time and patience.

Vorteile: Skyward's interface customization is great, giving users the ability to the display the data they need for their particular job. Almost every section, big or small, has a customize button you can use to turn settings on and off. As a result employee's have their own "Skyward" they can learn in and out. Another great thing I love about Skyward is how many reports you can run with it. If you need phone list for students of a particular grade then it can easily be generated. You can also see if someone else has already made that report and just clone it. Anything you need there's probably a report for it and if not it can be created relatively quickly.

Nachteile: Skyward has a quite large learning curve and without appropriate training it can easily overwhelm new users. It's not a program that can be self taught because some settings are hidden under several layers of menus. A new user would probably need about five or six hours of training to be able to be remotely competent with it. There are manuals and help guides available but I've found them to be hard to navigate.

Kommentare: This is my district's 7th year using Skyward. I am the counseling secretary in our high school and work in Student Management. I am also a security manager for our district. Honestly, when we made the transition to Skyward I was very unhappy. I didn't find Skyward to be very user friendly and I wasn't pleased with the customer support response time. Oftentimes I was unable to find a way to make Skyward do what I needed. However, as the years have passed, Skyward has made improvements to the program, I have learned the system better and the customer support live chat option is a huge timesaver. Now, I really enjoy using Skyward. I have the dubious distinction of being our district's "Skyward guru" and I believe I've learned a lot through exploration in my efforts to assist others. When I can't find answers, I know that help is only a live chat away! I would definitely recommend Skyward to other districts.

Vorteile: Possibly my favorite aspect of Skyward is the ability to dump data directly into Excel. This is a huge timesaver and allows me to manipulate, sort, share and utilize data as needed. I also like the ability to create reports based on my needs using Data Mining.

Nachteile: There are still a few things that I wish I could do in Skyward, that I can't, such as use activity groups to run certain reports/schedules. Occasionally, we experience what I call "Skyward quirks" when something doesn't work right one day, but it works the next. Recently, our library parapro ran a report and new that the info displayed wasn't wholly accurate. I checked her format and everything was good. I printed it with the same results. I cloned the report, changing nothing, and ran that and it was accurate. The next day her report worked properly again.

Kommentare: I use skyward as an Assistant Principal at a High School. I am constantly looking up where students are to pull them. Constantly looking at there grade, attendance and contact information.

Vorteile: -You can input almost anything into a student's profile and easily find what you are looking for.
-You can run numerous reports on anything. However, you have to know exactly what you want and how to do it. You will have to get training or read up on it.
-Easy for parents and students to view on your phone.
-Numerous options for attendance. Absent, Tardy, walked out, didn't come back from lunch, skipped, truant, doctor, excused, and about 20 more. The only one it doesn't have is absent because more than 15 minutes late.

Nachteile: -There is no easy way to print student grades, schedules and absences. It's not hard, but it's a lot of steps. Find the schedule, print the schedule to PDF, open the PDF, and then finally print the PDF. Attendance and grades are exported to excel and then you have to change the format to print on one page. Like I said, it's not hard, but why can't you just hit print.
-When searching for a student with a common name, sometimes the system doesn't show all of them.
-It does not tell you a student's current grade. It will show you T1, T2 and S1. T1 and T2 are the progress reports and S1 is the semester average, but it doesn't show the most current.

Kommentare: We have to keep detailed records on everything from students to the financial. This software does it all. It allows multiple people to see the same data and manipulate it, all while having secure separate log-ins. It keeps all the data, runs all reports and keeps logs of who has done what and when.

Vorteile: Skyward keeps all of the records and any information that you can possibly want to report, accessible at your fingertips.

Nachteile: The annual cost is a little much, not sure how it compares to other school softwares. It takes some training to use. If you know computers and how they work, it will be a snap. I did not find it very intuitive.

Kommentare: Skyward has been great for me as a teacher. This year we had some scheduling issues with Skyward as an entire school but other than that it has provided all of the promised features and more for my school district.

Vorteile: Skyward is the software my company uses to track attendance,grades, student information and scheduling. This product is pretty easy to use for the most part. The dashboard of the main page can be used to navigate the system. It offers various button for attendance and grading. There are other functions this product offers that I do not have access to an a teacher. I like that I can put in my grades and apply specific grading critera with click of a button.
I also enjoy that I can look back at previous classes I have taught and previous gradebooks. Overall I like that Skyward intergrates with some of the other software programs that I use as well. This makes a teachers life easy.

Nachteile: Skyward has many positives as a teacher I do wish that it gave you the option to assign a 50 for all missing assignments in he gradebook as this is the way most schools are going. Other than that overall I think Skyward works well and provides schools with a decent platform for their needs.