Jenzabar ONE is a complete management platform for higher ed featuring modules for student registration and advising, student life and events, human resources, fundraising and tuition, and also eLearning module with student portal and mobile app.
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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.
Jenzabar ONE is strongly suited for an all-in one solution for higher ed. The modern web-based platform make it efficient for end users. An institution that wants a full communication platform to connect with students, Jenzabar is the right product for your school. As with any product, development with Jenzabar One continues which is a good thing but also may cause some schools to want more features more quickly.
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.
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.
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.
We have not taken full advantage of all the modules that Jenzabar One provides yet. However, in news releases and product documents many improvements have been made.
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.
