Skyward, headquartered in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, offers the Skyward Student Management System, a k-12 student information system which provides classroom tools (e.g. gradebook, attendance tracking, etc), Family Engagement tools with portal, as well as admin and student services task management.
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Veracross
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Veracross is a student information system and has several modules, including Admission, Academics, Development, etc. all sharing a single database.
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
Veracross is software that can be highly recommended to anyone in the education industry. Veracross offers a breadth of services varying from administration to student-parent communication. The unique abilities that Veracross offers such as email reminders, attendance management, billing, and payment processing, and attendance tracking have made my job as an administrative support manager so much easier and more productive here at Teachables.
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.
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.
In the development module, it is often hard to pull reports because there are so many ways to do it. I work around that by saving reports I often pull so I don’t have to constantly rebuild reports.
The communications module, Composer, needs a major upgrade. It is not very user-friendly and there are not ways to edit or design modern and good-looking emails and newsletters. Not a lot of formatting options.
We will continue to use Veracross for the simple fact that we have one database across all of the departments in our school. Veracross continues to listen to customer feedback and improve and enhance the system.
LOVE the Technical Response Team - the first line of help at Veracross. I can quickly submit a ticket and receive a response knowing that they have looked in our system and know what we are trying to do! Our account manager is also amazing! So nice to have a person within the company who knows our school and our needs!
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.
Veracross has better built-in integrations with other platforms/systems. IT is much simpler and easy to use. It keeps records in a much simpler way and can be accessed through different modes of reporting. It is very easy to keep track of the progress in any training, project, or assignment with Veracross.
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.
