GoGuardian Teacher vs. Skyward Student Management System

GoGuardian Teacher is great for a teacher who needs a way to monitor student activities and work time on a laptop. It is easy to set up, simple to use and helps to keep students accountable when online in class. It integrates with Google Classroom which is a big help. It is more powerful for teachers experienced in using tech in the classroom. The archiving ability is great but the UX needs to improve.

Incentivized

Skyward SMS is well suited as a Student Management System for anyone who wants to drive their organization based on data. The capabilities of using the fields available as well as adding our own custom forms make data collection extremely easy. Reporting abilities take that data and allow us to make sense of what has been collected

Incentivized

• Cloud-based. Teachers do not have to monitor from just one device - they can do it from any device.
• GoGuardian allows teachers to lock a student's screen when he/she needs the students attention.
• GoGuardian allows the teacher to view all students' devices simultaneously.

Incentivized

• It's a helpful way to hold and organize a large database of information. This is helpful when working at a school with a large number of students and when there is a need to pull up one specific student and see all of their information, past and present, in one place.
• Helpful way to organize and track student and staff meal purchases.
• Easy to track student grades and post comments about student performance.

Incentivized

• Scope of device monitoring (laptops, desktop computers and not just Chromebooks)
• Needs an updated interface to more accurately fit advances in technology
• Ability to more easily interact and adjust with a student's device

Incentivized

• I would love to see teachers have a more user-friendly dashboard for each student where there were icons/buttons that could be pushed to take you to that student's IEP, grades, etc. It's all on a sidebar now, but some thing you have to do a few click-thru's to get to. Overall I have very few critiques of Skyward.
• I would like something that communicates more with parents of how to maximize their use of Skyward. For the not-so digitally inclined parents, it can be a bit intimidating to navigate this database system.

Incentivized

For a technology-heavy school, it is a necessary and good tool for managing classroom use of laptops. It is easy to set up and use. Helps track time on task and internet usage. Another source of data when speaking to parents about student work and activity. Can help plan and manage work time when you have limited devices.

Incentivized

Skyward is our core system, we are most likely going to be using it for some time

Incentivized

Used by more than 1500 staff users in my district. Also used by 30000 parents.

Incentivized

The support is great. On the rare occasion that I've had to reach out to support they have been very quick to respond and extremely helpful. I've also had teachers reach out directly to support themselves. Most of the time I don't even know that a teacher has reached out to support until after the fact. They always seem satisfied.

Incentivized

Overall great job, issues were taken care of. People in support do care.

Incentivized

Yes, I was part of the implementation team.

Incentivized

I have used Hapara in a previous school district. GoGuardian is more user-friendly and easier to setup. I do think GoGuardian has some room on improving the ease of finding some areas of the program, but once you know the path to get there it is quick.

Incentivized

I think Skyward does really well compared to Infinite Campus. They both have the capability to see students’ information, behavior history, and academic history from the district. However, Infinite Campus has a slight edge on the grade book in the way that it can customize a grade book to meet our needs.

Incentivized

• We have been able to identify inappropriate websites that students have discovered. For example anonymous proxies, movie streaming, etc. Through this software, we have been able to identify the students and in turn block the websites.
• We have been able to identify which students have been using other user's accounts. This was an unintended side effect of the software. If a teacher knows that a student is using a Chromebook but the student is not showing up in the software, we are easily able to deduce that the user must be using another student's account.

Incentivized

• Skyward can be confusing for staff if they have never used it before as it is not intuitive therefore someone has to go over how to use it to new staff. Sometimes this can take weeks to a whole year to understand where to go.
• Skyward has increased issues with rostering for online services due to the fields not updating properly. This has caused weeks of headache for the technology department.
• Skyward does not have a Google integration so we have to buy a middle software to create users, groups, etc.

Incentivized