Skyward Student Management Suite Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.3 out of 10

Score

8.3 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Skyward Student Management System are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Flexibility in Customization: Several users have praised Skyward for its flexibility in capturing data and customizing the system according to their specific needs. This customization capability has been highly appreciated as it allows users to tailor Skyward to their unique requirements.

Efficient Customer Support: Many reviewers have highlighted that Skyward provides quick response to trouble tickets, with the company striving to reach out to the customer within an hour and start the process of resolution. This prompt and efficient customer support has been seen as a significant advantage by users.

Dedication to User Satisfaction: Users have consistently mentioned that Skyward is very user-focused and constantly looks for ways to enhance the end-user experience and improve the system. This dedication to user satisfaction has been highly praised as it demonstrates Skyward's commitment to ensuring a positive and user-friendly experience.

Reviews

17 Reviews

Skyward Student Management System - best option or not?

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

January 17, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My school uses Skyward Student Management System for grading, attendance, and student/parent communications. In My opinion, the attendance and grading features are worthwhile. I do not use the communications aspect, as we also use Google Classroom and it has easier to use options to communicate with students and parents using its Gmail interface.

Pros

Grading
Attendance
Report Card posting

Cons

Does not import assignments or grades from Google Classroom
Software times out too quickly, if inactive for a short period of time
Should come with "Intro to Skyward Student Management System" video trainings for new teachers or people who have not used this software tool before.

Likelihood to Recommend

Appropriate for grade tracking and attendance.

Not sure where it would be inappropriate but there are certainly things it could do better, as I noted in a previous question.

Bill Black

Commercial Art Teacher at Omak High School (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

View profile

Confident User

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 15, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a music teacher, I teach the entire school population. Currently, I teach 10 classes. My grades are in the following categories, class work, tests, research, and couple more. I tend to put my work into subcategories in participation, and application of skills. What I wish I knew to do was transfer grades from Google classroom into Skyward Student Management System. That knowledge is not intuitive for me. That would save me quite a bit of time.

Pros

Stores identifying student information
Ease of adding events with editable dates
Includes room for comments
Computes overall total grade

Cons

The ability to transfer grades from spreadsheets into Skyward Student Management System

Likelihood to Recommend

Skyward Student Management System is particularly well suited to put in applicable assignments and grades for students in grades K-8. Generally, I find it easy to use. In fact, when I have new students, who are not always able to spell their names correctly, I go straight to Skyward Student Management System and look up the information.

Verified User

Employee (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Students know Skyward is the first place to go.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

January 8, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Skyward is the school district's main Learning Management System (LMS). It tracks student grades, discipline, and attendance. As well as many other important pieces of information, including demographic information, IEP/504 information, and any medical alert information. It also serves as a host for communication between teachers/school staff and families, as parents can send a message to all of their student's teachers from one place, and teachers can send messages to students, parents, or both from the messaging center.

Pros

Allow custom grading categories with editable weight.
Automatically calculate midterm and final grades.
Store data for students across their entire educational career.

Cons

Integration with outside systems (Google Classroom) can be clunky at times (though it has gotten better with time.)
Student search can only be done by last name.
Messaging is not well integrated into the entire application, it can only be accessed from the messaging center.

Likelihood to Recommend

There is nothing specific that I would say sets it apart from any other LMS, but once you are used to the user interface and various features, it does everything that is needed and integrates well enough with other software to function. Probably isn't necessary in a smaller setting, but for multiple building districts, it is certainly robust enough to handle data collection and storage.

Andrew Defever

Teacher at Big Rapids Public Schools (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Skyward Student Management System Provides Solid Secuirty and Management for Student and Staff Data.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 4, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Skyward Student Management System to manage all of our student and employee data. On the student side, the most common usage includes family contact information, student identification and photos, current courses, photo permissions and emergency contacts. On the staff side, the most common usages are for submitting and approving timesheets, sick leave, vacation and managing tax forms.

Pros

Student and family contact information
Storing unique data on students (photo permission, classes, etc.)
Employee management (timesheet, vacation, sick leave, etc.)

Cons

UI could use an update to be more user friendly.
Search functionality is not great on the student side.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's a great back-end database system. I would recommend it to a colleague at another education-focused institution as it is very secure and provides you with all of the data management tools that you would need for K-12. It does a good job for employee management, too, and it's never bad to bundle your systems/services together.

Daniel Campbell

Creative Director in Marketing at Minnetonka Public Schools (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Verified on LinkedIn

Skyward Usage in Education (K-12)

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 27, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Skyward for attendance, grading, and class roster management in our school district. This is used in all campuses K-12. This allows us to have data collection, organization, and ease of communication between our students, teachers, and parents.

Pros

Roster organization
Ease of use
Ease of grading and records.

Cons

Some navigation is difficult.
Format of software seems dated.
Needs more ability for teachers to be able to customize.

Likelihood to Recommend

Skyward, beyond its pro and cons, is overall an easy program to use. Once having a few months to use the program, it becomes very easy to use and habit for how to use.

Evan Shepherd

Teacher at Prosper ISD (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Skyward works for us

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 18, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Skyward district-wide for business, scheduling, grades, food service, health. You name it, Skyward is basically a one-stop shop for most of it. Many districts have to utilize several different applications and work to try to get them to 'talk' amongst themselves. Skyward alleviates this issue by combining most of these types of apps together.

Pros

Reports are easy to use.
Everything is one place.
Support is wonderful.

Cons

Skyward takes time to learn.
It can be complicated at times.

Likelihood to Recommend

Any larger K-12 educational institution would benefit from Skyward. It's a great way to maintain data and reporting, as well as run the business aspects of a district. While it may suit most needs for most districts, Skyward might be too large a system for small school districts, so care should be taken when evaluating it.

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Skyward needs an remodel

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

May 17, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Skyward is being used by every staff and our families. Skyward helps save student, and staff information in a convenient database. Staff can look up their own information including pay. Students can look up their grades and lunch money on their account. Counselors are able to set students courses up in their record for the coming year. Tech department is able to use this info to create accounts for software for students.

Pros

Skyward has the ability to create reports for almost every field that we use which is so robust.
The information that is saved will be forever a part of a record.

Cons

Skyward's reporting can get confusing so it would be nice if it was cleaner and possibly came with some common reports other schools use too.
Skyward's GUI is out of date and needs a refresher.
Skyward can have compatibility issues after an update.

Likelihood to Recommend

Skyward is well suited for schools that have probably over 1000 students and staff.

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Great SIS for a sophisticated school district

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 21, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Student Information System, across the whole school system. Used by school officials, teachers, students, and parents.

Pros

Skyward does really well with the teacher, student, and parent chain.
Skyward is easy to use.
Skyward helps the school district with state reporting.
Very good teacher grade book.
Excellent student online enrollment.

Cons

Skyward should move to a more modern SQL platform.
Skyward should perform better testing on their solution before rolling it out to users.
The Skybuild interface should be updated including adding more fields.

Likelihood to Recommend

Skyward is very well suited to the teacher/parent/student relation. In general, Skyward helps with most areas within a school system. Some with greater detail some with less. Very good support and training for end users. Excellent implementation team. Skyward should do more for Transportation, although huge improvements were made. The software is far away from reaching routing and planning solutions.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Skyward. Great Now and Getting Better!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 15, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Skyward Student Management System (SMS) is the heart of what we do in regards to student records. It is used by departments ranging from attendance to discipline to student services, health services, and administration. Skyward SMS allows us to have a user focused platform that allows us to focus on the job at hand, which is to educate our students and guide our decisions to meet that mission. Our reporting needs are more easily accomplished with the use of Skyward to help us maintain our data integrity.

Pros

Flexibility. This multitude of fields available makes it easy to capture data the way we want or need to.
Quick response to trouble tickets. The company strives to reach out to the customer within an hour and start the process of resolution.
User focused. Improvements to the system always look at how the end user experience can be enhanced.

Cons

Interface. The current SMS 2.0 interface, while functional and user friendly is not visually appealing when compared to more currently designed web products. This is being corrected with the implementation of their Qmlativ product which takes aesthetics and functionality to the next level.
More granular role based security. Again, this is being corrected with their newest product version. SMS 2.0 is very funtional and meets the needs we have, but security tweaks are preferred.
It's difficult to pick out what areas we would like to see improvement on as we are already scheduling our transition to the new version and we know that many of our concerns have already been addressed.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Scott Herring

Database Support Specialist in Information Technology at Lehigh Career & Technical Institute (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

View profile

Spectacular Skyward

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 15, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have been using Skyward for the past 13 years if not more. It is user-friendly and very convenient to use. I am able to successfully put grades in without any issues. I even use the app on my phone when I'm not in front of the computer. Skyward has made my life easier. I take attendance on Skyward and I even use it to write up not only my students but other students who are enrolled in the same school. My entire district uses Skyward for progress reports and report cards.

Pros

Put in grades of students for every semester.
Skyward electronically averages student grades.
Put in comments for report cards every nine weeks.
Take attendance daily.
Find student information regarding addresses, contact information, student allergies, parental rights etc.
Write up students if necessary.
Response to intervention is now available on Skyward.

Cons

Skyward logs me out if it's inactive for a certain period of time and that frustrates me as a user.
At the end of a semester, when a lot of users are on Skyward, Skyward server goes down and this happens frequently.

Likelihood to Recommend

I find student contact information and student risk factors/student allergies [helpful] especially when I receive a new student in my class.

Conduct grades can be more specific/narrow instead of being too generic/wide.

Isha Gangopadhaya

First grade teacher in Professional Services at Fort Bend ISD (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

13 years of experience

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Skyward. Great Now and Getting Better!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 15, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Flexibility. This multitude of fields available makes it easy to capture data the way we want or need to.
Quick response to trouble tickets. The company strives to reach out to the customer within an hour and start the process of resolution.
User focused. Improvements to the system always look at how the end user experience can be enhanced.

Cons

Interface. The current SMS 2.0 interface, while functional and user friendly is not visually appealing when compared to more currently designed web products. This is being corrected with the implementation of their Qmlativ product which takes aesthetics and functionality to the next level.
More granular role based security. Again, this is being corrected with their newest product version. SMS 2.0 is very funtional and meets the needs we have, but security tweaks are preferred.
It's difficult to pick out what areas we would like to see improvement on as we are already scheduling our transition to the new version and we know that many of our concerns have already been addressed.

Likelihood to Recommend

Scott Herring

Database Support Specialist in Information Technology at Lehigh Career & Technical Institute (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

View profile