Boardingware, headquartered in Auckland, offers their student management system for boarding schools, built around managing the needs particular to boarding schools, such as student care and student tracking.
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Google Classroom
Score 8.2 out of 10
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N/A
$0
per month
Infinite Campus
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Infinite Campus headquartered in Blaine offers their student information system (SIS) to educational institutions, boasting onboarding support, parent and student portal, grade book and academic planner, and access to the platform's inbuilt LMS Campus Learning.
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Pricing
Orah
Google Classroom
Infinite Campus
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Education Fundamentals
$0
per license/per month
Google Workspace for Education Standard
$3
per student/per year
Teaching and Learning Upgrade
$4
per license/per month
Google Workspace for Education Plus
$5
per student/per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Orah
Google Classroom
Infinite Campus
Free Trial
No
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Education Fundamentals Version - 30-day free trial for qualifying institutions.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Orah
Google Classroom
Infinite Campus
Considered Multiple Products
Orah
Verified User
Employee
Chose Orah
Senior Systems did not work as well and the functionality from the administrative side is not as user-friendly. I often felt like it was down and not working properly, or that I could not find where certain documents are. I believe that for a boarding school community …
Google Classroom is free and easy for all. It's also easy to integrate other Google platforms with. It helps transfer grades from one place in Google to another. I currently use PowerSchools for grade recording, and have used Infinite Campus in the past. These are great for …
This is a different platform, but it's easy to chat with others when you need to for work or other conversations.I like how convenient it is to access.
I much prefer Infinite Campus to Google Classroom. For all of the reasons that I have previously explained, I much prefer Infinite Campus to Google Classroom. I still, however, utilize Google Docs and things of that nature but as far as a grade book type of program or software, …
I find these other products to be much more simplified in their set up and user friendly where with Infinite Campus, it requires a good amount of time and patience to acclimate to the set up and arrangement of content. Also, the other products I have reviewed are more appealing …
When I used SAMs in the past, there were several times that my data was "lost." Reports weren't as user-friendly as the reports on Infinite Campus. Navigation through the different functions is much easier on Infinite Campus.
Tyler is a very versatile program. However, it is extremely cluttered, and many parents are overwhelmed by trying to navigate it to the point where they will not even use it. Tyler SIS allows parents to see similar information in addition to their child's grades, but the volume …
Infinite Campus was easier for us to see the benefit of when making a purchasing decision. The competitors we were considering came as components of larger models and it became confusing to us which benefits of the products would be available to us only purchasing their student …
This is hands down the best application on the market in terms of making sure parents and staff understand where students are at any given time during the day. It also has done a great job of expanding into buy-in areas for students such as having event sign-ups inside the application. Having parent accounts also does a great job of keeping lines of communication open between the parents, school, and students.
Google Classroom allows teachers to post for daily lessons and assignments. It also allows teachers to be able to communicate with students easily outside of class. Students are able to stay connected and know where to find all information and resources easily in a streamlined manner for all of their classes.
Infinite Campus is very easy to use when it comes to looking up personal student information as well as taking attendance. However, it is less suited for making it easy for users to find specific language testing data, ensuring the viewer feels confident in finding the correct webpage based on what they are looking for as well as being properly set up for the viewer to feel confident in arranging a progress report easily as well as quickly. Lastly, Infinite Campus could better enable the user to copy progress reports in bulk versus the current set up of having to go into each student's progress report individually to print.
Student-teacher communication - I love using Classroom for this because my students can always go back and check what was on Classroom by looking through the stream. This way they don't have to go dig through emails to find what they're looking for.
Posting to multiple classes - I can post the same announcement or assignment to multiple classes at once without having to repeat the process or send separate emails.
Streamlining grading - when students turn work in on Classroom, it all goes to one place and then when I'm grading I can open their documents directly from Classroom or my Drive folder. This way, I'm not looking through emails and Google Doc shared files for their assignment.
The Gradebook is just so busy, even though it does contain all the grades/information you need, I find it very hard to find data/information just because of the sheer numbers and drop downs that I have to go through to get to what I want.
Not very user-friendly for first time users - takes many tries and searching around to get to where you want. Gets easier as you use it, but they could attempt to make it more user-friendly for the novice/first time users.
I'd like to see the drop-down menu for the classes broken up into separate folders/files for each group (ie. ELA, Social Studies, Science, Math). Then it wouldn't be just rows and rows of classes that make my eyes run them all together and hard to find the ONE I am looking for.
Testing is particularly important in online learning, and Google Classroom falls far short of other learning management systems in this regard. Security is also a concern: while account control is reasonable for the account used with Google Classroom, the person controlling a particular account is often able to, for example, forward or download proprietary materials.
Simple design and seamless integration with Google tools and drive, but missing some key features. However, since it is limited in overall functions and ability to truly personalize / customize, it is quite user friendly and easy to set up and get going, other than sending out the code to your course or dropping students in via their gmail account. Users of Google Forms and sites will find the layout similar in design.
I gave this rating because Boardingware support is unbelievable. They are quick to reply and have a chat feature that they not only are there for most of the day but you can leave a note if they are not available and they get back to you very quickly. I thoroughly enjoyed any conversations I had with support from Boardingware.
Since this platform is provided by Google, the technical support is better than any others, and we are not required to bother about the space constraints for adding the contents. If we have a good uninterrupted internet facility we can access Google Classroom without any delay or lag. They have app support in both Android and iPhone.
I haven't reached out to Infinite Campus for technical support. We have in-school people who are trained to help us out in the event of a problem. We have had a couple of times where the system has gone down unexpectedly, but our school IT professionals were able to sort it out.
It was relatively easy to implement due to the simplicity of the platform. Even our more technology challenged teachers found it easy to get started with Google Classroom.
Senior Systems did not work as well and the functionality from the administrative side is not as user-friendly. I often felt like it was down and not working properly, or that I could not find where certain documents are. I believe that for a boarding school community Boardingware was much more user-friendly, and did not take as many steps in order to get the job done quickly.
I haven't tested or evaluated another digital classroom website or application. I feel like Google Classroom is convenient for many reasons such as compatibility to Google docs, slides, etc. I also love the ability to link to YouTube and other sites. I don't know if there would be a site that is easier to maneuver.
Synergy, PowerSchool. Infinite Campus was definitely the "Cadillac" when looking at other systems. Other systems look and felt clunky when stacked against Infinite Campus. Although the company is not local, they FEEL and ACT as though they are right next door.
We were tracking student leave by hand or by an in-house program. Both of these became inefficient and/or unusable. Having Boardingware has expedited the process. It's hard to give numbers, but we're several days ahead of where we used to be in terms of tracking students' leave for Thanksgiving break.
Parent involvement was always an issue, but with Boardingware parents must approve a leave before we (the school) does. This makes parents take responsibility for their child which happens less than it should.
Having access to flagged students with health issues makes it much easier to plan field trips. We can easily know who should have what meds or epi pens based on their Boardingware profile. Safety awareness and prevention has gone up due to this feature.
Infinite Campus helped us to successfully meet our goals in the last Strategic Plan of establishing an electronic communication framework for academic progress between the district and parents.
Issues with integration, or lack thereof, has resulted in loss of productivity and ultimately revenue since countless hours are dedicated to grading inputs that would have otherwise been spent on fulfilling other institution needs.
