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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Infinite Campus
Score 7.5 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
