Frontline Professional Growth vs. Schoolbox

This is perfect for the district looking to convert older physical forms to digital copies, and mitigate the tracking of forms from desk to desk. Frontline will do it all digitally. Those in the approval process can approve or deny, or even ask for more information, which sends the form back to the user who submitted it. This is also good for those looking for a way to manage professional development in their district and all that comes with it, including tracking workshops, awarding hours, etc. Most districts use Frontline programs somewhere, so this is another piece to that. However, this is cost-heavy.

Incentivized

Schoolboxn is well suited to being a school portal. You can manage user accounts, access to information and communicate to users individually or as a group. The pages allow for a great range of media types, you can use blog, forum or chat and embed videos and images easily. As an LMS, this system is great. Student accounts link to class information easily by the back end sync tools. Giving students instant access to their information. Assessments are easily submitted and feedback given by teachers can be viewed by students and parents.

A situation where this system is less suitable is if you work in a school that already has a dedicated portal and/or LMS.

Incentivized

• Frontline Professional Growth is set up to organize and document all aspects of a teacher's evaluation. Artifacts are archived and can be used in multiple areas.
• SGOs, observations, PDPs, and documentation logs can all be shared between the staff member and the administration.
• The forms are easy to fill out, can be saved as drafts in progress, and can be referred to from year to year.
• The Professional Development Workshop section offers a calendar of workshops in catalog format as well as calendar format.
• As a workshop presenter, enrollment tools are easy to use and offer multiple ways to access your roster.
• As a workshop participant, workshops are listed as in progress and completed. Hours are tabulated and saved each year.

Incentivized

• Learning management
• Feedback management
• Communications - email/news posting

Incentivized

• Confusing sign-on processes.
• AESOP (absence management) is not integrated with Professional Growth as advertised.

Incentivized

• User interface
• System search
• Quiz builder

Incentivized

Overall, Frontline Professional Growth manages observations, SGOs, documentation logs, and Professional Development Plans. In addition to these evaluation pieces, it allows our district to manage our Professional Development Workshops (in-house), Professional Development requests (for out-of-district), and many online request forms. The only real negative is that some of the menus are a bit cumbersome, and it takes several steps to get around the system.

Incentivized

I have only used this and GCN trainings. I think it helps having more choices that hold value to your work day.

Incentivized

Canvas is purely an LMS. Whilst it is a good system, it didn’t allow us to manage parent communication or use it as a portal. In the end we didn’t want to manage 2 separate systems. Schoolbox is the only all in one system we found that stacked up. Other systems did the portal well, or the LMS well, but not both together.

Incentivized

• We have used a lot less paper over the past few years which leads to cost savings.
• The time it takes to submit a form and get approval has sped up since this is all digital.
• The time it takes to track and award professional development hours has sped up.

Incentivized

• It’s a time saver for teachers as course information can be re-used
• User administration rules allows for automation
• Parent comms are centralised and easily managed

Incentivized