We have been very happy with Veracross, which we've used for the last
year. We find that it is comprehensive, flexible, well-designed, and
progressive (in the sense that the company continually incorporates
useful, new technologies and approaches). We use it for admissions,
registrar, scheduling, and grading; they made our teachers' grading work
so simple that our staff moved easily in a single year from our previous
FileMaker-based system (we printed and mailed grades to parents) to online
grading where parents login (a pretty big cultural and technical
transition for us).
I'd also like to encourage you to follow earlier advice (if you haven't
already) to create a list of your requirements based on interviews with
your stakeholders. We tried to make our requirements pretty specific
(e.g., teachers need to share their reports electronically with
supervising teachers before they're sent to parents; teachers prefer to
input grades/comments for all students in a class on a single screen; the
demo needs to be conducted from a Macintosh client to verify
compatibility; and so on). With our requirements in hand, we called about
a dozen vendors and interviewed them on the phone. Then we invited the 4
who seemed best to do demos for our division heads and teachers (any
teachers who wanted to attend) based on our requirements specifically (in
other words, we asked the vendors to put aside their "canned" demos and
focus on what we needed).
I'm happy to answer more questions anytime.
Terry
. . .
Terry Dash
Director of Technology
The Pike School (PreK - 9)
34 Sunset Rock Road
Andover, Massachusetts 01810
ph: 978-475-1197 x6623
fx: 978-475-3014
A forum for independent school educators <ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU> writes:
>Hi,We are looking for a student information system to replace SASI. I
>would appreciate your recommendations. Thanks in advance!Mary Knopp,
>MLSLibrary Media SpecialistAcademy of Mount St. Ursula330 Bedford Park
>BoulevardBronx, NY 10458718-354-5353 x225
>
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