Edsby vs. Rediker Administrator's Plus

Edsby is well-suited for day-to-day communication with students, either in the classroom, or at home. It makes planning course progression easier because of the built in day-by-day calendar for the semester. It is transferable, so the work one does in one semester can be copied over to the next, and modified as needed. Students can see the Lesson Plan which is projected onto the SmartBoard, but the font is quite small so they cannot read it from where they are sitting, so I use SmartNotes which has a larger font and then, if needed, attach that note to the Edsby day lesson planner.

It's a great system for storing student information and extracting it into usable data. If you're looking for a robust report creation system, though, it's not the best choice unless you have someone skilled with programming languages.

Incentivized

• Edsby is extremely easy to learn and use.
• Students love the "social media" feel to Edsby.

• The ease of data exports into easy Excel Spreadsheets is one of my favorite features. It allows me the ability to quickly see data and arrange it for ease of use of our teachers, administrative staff, and stakeholders.
• Administrative Plus can be easily customized to display student record data in the most relevant way for our organization.
• The customer service support team is always quick to respond, and extremely helpful. I can reach them through user forums, emails, or a phone call, and I know they will always provide a fast and thorough response.

Incentivized

• Edsby shows the last time a user logged on. Unfortunately, if someone doesn't log out you have no way of knowing if someone has seen a recent post or is really using Edsby to its potential.

• Their reports feature needs to be more user friendly. They use their own personal code to write reports, and it's not very user friendly to the average person. It would be much nicer to have a WYSIWYG editor where I could create what I wanted without having to know their special language.
• The system could use a more modern face lift, and perhaps a more intuitive interface.
• The sync process between the Parent, Teacher, and Student Portals is slow. Data should be continually synced between the two in real time, instead of initiated by the user.

Incentivized

Everything is easy to use and well as being overly user-friendly to your average student.

EDSBY was piloted at the school last semester, and I found it made my job easier, which is a boon since time is fleeting and I could get more done with less effort with Edsby. After the pilot the entire school district was signed up to use Edsby. I like it very much. I did use a blog on First Class which was extremely difficult to learn, and a blog on WordPress which was easier to learn how to use but not interactive like Edsby is. To my mind, Edsby is far superior to the former.

We were using Aeries for our student information system prior to Rediker, and it was a messy database with too much redundancy, making it difficult to extract the data you were looking for from the system.

Incentivized

• For the most part, teachers, parents and students love the system. It provides easy access to the information that they need when they need it.

• A less expensive alternative as far as Student Information Systems go.

Incentivized