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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SchoolSpeak
Score 10.0 out of 10
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SchoolSpeak, a Community Brands company, offers an elementary, middle school, or preschool school management system oriented around the needs of private entities, offering student information management, performance tracking and grade book, student and family data repository, calendar with announcements and alerts, payment management and personalized homepage, among other features.
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.
Specifically speaking, SchoolSpeak is best used and only really utilized in education. From K-12 it serves a great purpose in terms of parent interaction and direct communication with parents about child performance, attendance, and scores in school. At younger ages, I think it will be even more appropriate for it to be used to create strictly parent platforms for helping them enroll in things they can do at home for their kids, teach their own children, and monitor their own children—especially if they are stay-at-home parents, homeschooling, or the children are not enrolled in school yet. I think a great idea would be creating a parent portal for newborns with daily activities to do from birth through age three, when they may go to pre-school. This is the only additional option I think that SchoolSpeak could serve.
One thing it does well is one of the tools it incorporation, volunteer forms. These forms work for parents, teachers, and students. One of the hardest things to do is to get confirmation sign-ups and support. This streamlines the process of organizing events.
The gradebook interface is easy to use and understand. In order to take attendance, complete grades and give assignments, SchoolSpeak actually is an easy platform to learn and is smoothly integrated.
Archiving of past classes is easy to do and important because schools need to retain records for a long time after students have moved on.
The platform lets you organize students and find them quickly by graduation.
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.
It can definitely have room for improvement in the design and template options. Using a more appealing layout like WIX or WEEBLY offer, but integrating the school speak platform into it would be a wonderful layout and great functionality.
I would love to see social media integration. For business courses and media courses, there should be the ability to have social platforms connect directly and load within ShcoolSpeak. Social Media is the newest marketing strategy and it is left out of functionality here.
Custom font downloads would make the design much easier and more attractive. The fonts they allow you to use are basic and overly common.
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.
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.
Moodle Rooms is a free platform but involves the need to be computer savvy. It is easy to use as well as SchoolSpeak. However, SchoolSpeak does have a direct communication platform with parents something that Moodle does not currently offer. This itself is a huge competitive advantage. The comparison then becomes, would you like to do less work but purchase SchoolSpeak, or do more work using multiple platforms but they are free. The SchoolSpeak platform does offer much more for the investment. Longer term and with full school integration, the investment is worth it. If you were to mandate using a platform, it should be SchoolSpeak because there are fewer risks associated with having to coach and education teachers, and less risk of complaints.
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.
Positively speaking, it has a positive ROI. Although expensive, the platform does solve issues that we as educators have in giving parents daily information about their child in school. It is difficult to email all parents or call all parents, but a one-click platform really saves time and is worth the investment.
Negatively, there is a cost associated, and therefore, sometimes teachers can be given more work instead of buying a platform like this. Using other free tools could be more time consuming but cheaper.
Using School Speak we have seen parent involvement increase.
