Jenzabar now offers SONIS, a student information system (SIS) oriented around the needs of smaller higher education institutions. Jenzabar supports the former SONISWEB product since its acquisition of original developer RJM Systems in 2015.
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LanSchool
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Lenovo offers LanSchool, a classroom management platform supporting collaboration, monitoring student activity, chat, teacher broadcasting / screen-sharing, and other features.
We often had students who came and took a class or completed a program, left, and then came back for something else at a later time. It was nice to be able to have someone in Jenzabar SONIS with multiple statuses. They could be in as a Student for the current class while still being in as an Alumni for the program they had graduated from. Most of our programs are set up so the students within that program are all taking the same courses at the same time. The bulk registration feature made it easy to enroll one student and then use that student's enrollment to quickly enroll all of the others in the program. That was a huge time saver. We had letters and emails that we wanted to send out at specific times in the application process. The Activity tool in Jenzabar SONIS made it easy for us to have some things that were automatically added to a person's record and others that we could add as needed. We could then run timed letters or emails and get our communication sent out. We had some challenges with Jenzabar SONIS because we have a number of certificate programs that are only one semester in length. We often had students who would complete one certificate (program) in the fall and then complete another one in the spring. Many of the reports pulled data only for the active enrollment so we had to go back and manually pull the data for the enrollment from the other semester if we needed something for the full school year.
I have recommended it across campus and would not hesitate to do so again. It has been great in our lab environments and would like to continue using it for years to come. In the future as we move away from physical labs I will be investigating to purchase for BYOD devices, however I know that I will face pushback from students on this. However we must weigh privacy & security vs. using BYOD devices and integrity on exams.
Lenovo LanSchool has a very easy to use and easy to learn interface. With software, the hardest thing to do is to teach new teachers or veteran teachers how to use technology in their classrooms. Being able to easily teach teachers to use this software is one of the best aspects of the [Lenovo LanSchool].
Something that LanSchool does well is to monitor student actions. On the screens, you can see all the linked computers of all students. This feature lets you see every student on one screen. The alternative is walking around the classroom or scrolling through pages of student screens, with LanSchool you can guarantee that you are seeing all screens at once.
Overall classroom management is a key feature on the platform. You can share files, freeze student screens, blank out student screens and share another screen to the entire class. There are far more options in terms of engaging the students than a conventional method of asking students to pay attention. Installing LanSchool is a huge asset for teachers to engage and update their lessons.
A cool element I seldom use is the speaking software, being able to speak through their computer screens is great to give direction or get attention quickly.
SONIS sorts my advisees by class and then by name. This is NOT useful. There should be an option for sorting by name only. I advise almost fifty students. It wastes my time looking for them in the sophomore listing, then the junior listing......
When registration of a student for semester courses is complete, there should be an option to print out only the courses scheduled, NOT the entire page which shows available courses at the bottom.
We changed databases in 2011 because the company we were with was going to quit supporting our software. We evaluated a number of different SISs available at the time and felt Jenzabar SONIS provided the best tools for our school. Most of the others were either geared more for adult education, individual course offerings or for schools that primarily had degree-seeking students. We needed something that could address both needs.We felt Jenzabar SONIS did that best of the ones we reviewed.
