Skyward Student Management System - best option or not?
My school uses Skyward Student Management System for grading, attendance, and student/parent communications. In My opinion, the attendance …
Overview
What is Skyward Student Management System?
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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What is Skyward Student Management System?
Skyward Student Management System Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Student Data Security highest, with a score of 8.8.
The most common users of Skyward Student Management System are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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Skyward SMS is a versatile student management system that is widely used across various departments in schools. With its user-focused platform, educators can effectively focus on educating students and making informed decisions. The software serves as a centralized database for student information, including schedules, grades, behavior history, and contact details. Teachers find the software user-friendly and reliable for tasks such as entering grades and taking attendance. Additionally, Skyward SMS enhances communication between students, teachers, and parents, facilitating data collection and organization. Parents and students also benefit from the system by being able to access grades, receive messages from teachers, and monitor assignments. Moreover, the software's ability to share student information across years and locations within the school district makes it a convenient tool for administrators to manage various school-related tasks such as business operations, scheduling, grades, and food service. Overall, Skyward SMS has proven to be effective and useful for teachers, schools, and the entire district by increasing productivity through instant access to information and enabling accurate record-keeping while promoting communication among all stakeholders involved in a student's education journey.
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.
Visually Unappealing Interface: Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the current interface of Skyward Student Management System, stating that it is visually unappealing compared to more modern web products.
Confusing Terminology: Users have mentioned that the terminology used for headings in the system can be confusing. For example, labeling the caseload of students as "My Activities" instead of "My Caseload" has caused confusion and made it harder for users to navigate the system.
Difficulties with Grades Calculation: Several reviewers have reported difficulties with Skyward's ability to accurately calculate grades according to the standards-based gradebook used by some schools. This issue has created frustration among teachers who rely on accurate grade calculations for their students' academic progress.
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Reviews
(1-9 of 9)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 15, 2024
Confident User
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.
- Stores identifying student information
- Ease of adding events with editable dates
- Includes room for comments
- Computes overall total grade
- The ability to transfer grades from spreadsheets into Skyward Student Management System
January 08, 2024
Students know Skyward is the first place to go.
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.
- Allow custom grading categories with editable weight.
- Automatically calculate midterm and final grades.
- Store data for students across their entire educational career.
- 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.
March 18, 2021
Skyward works for us
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.
- Reports are easy to use.
- Everything is one place.
- Support is wonderful.
- Skyward takes time to learn.
- It can be complicated at times.
October 25, 2019
The sky is the limit with Skyward!
I work in a high school and it is being used across the whole district. The district employs about 1,000 staff, but at the high school level we have around 175. We use it for our personal information, like payroll, time off, personnel file, etc. We can also use it to look up student schedules, grades, and behavior history.
- Skyward does well with managing the students' information. It was easy to find a student's schedule, grades, behavior record, or family information because it was all separated out.
- Another strength is the system’s way of requesting time off. All of the steps are laid out in a organized manner, and you can check the status of the request with one click.
- Skyward also pairs well with other applications. Whenever I need a substitute for a class, Skyward links me to Aesop (the absence software) and allows me to put in the request. When I’m done, Skyward updates automatically with that information.
- One area Skyward can improve is the terminology used for its headings. The caseload of students that I manage is labeled under “My Activites” instead of using “My Caseload”.
- Another area of improvement is the way grades are calculated. My school uses a standards-based gradebook and Skward has a hard time calculating the grades the way we want it.
- Skyward can also improve in the customization of the homepage. There are too many buttons to click to get to the screen for attendance, and it’s hard to put a shortcut on the homepage.
October 25, 2019
Skyward. Great Now and Getting Better!
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.
- 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.
- 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.
May 17, 2019
Skyward needs an remodel
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.
- 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.
- 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.
March 21, 2019
Great SIS for a sophisticated school district
Student Information System, across the whole school system. Used by school officials, teachers, students, and parents.
- 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.
- 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.
November 13, 2018
Student Management AND Student Accountability
At the high school where I am employed, we, the teachers, use Skyward to keep a record of grades, score students at the end of each grading period, and keep parents informed on their child's academic progress. Skyward allows the teachers to have multiple places to record student grades, to help prevent flawed grading. Also, by keeping parents directly informed of their children's grades, it removes the temptation for the students to be dishonest about their grades.
- Skyward organizes student grades in an easy to read way.
- Skyward keeps track of all of the contact information of each student and is organized according to the best contact person.
- Skyward allows the students to keep track of their own grades, and allows the teacher to keep their students informed.
- Skyward is not particularly user-friendly. It seems like an out-dated program that is difficult to navigate at first.
- Skyward has many helpful tools, but they are difficult to find and understand.
- Skyward doesn't allow the students and parents to see the comments that a teacher may put on an assignment's grade and reduces the level of understanding the parent could have about their student's grade.
- Children and parents see the same information. There should be a different viewing option for both.
November 13, 2018
Review of Skyward by a Teacher who uses it daily!
We have approximately 1,200 students in our student body at our school. We use it as a database for all of the kids in the county. It provides a standard way for all teachers and administrators to access student schedules, grades, discipline records, referrals, and contact information in a central location. We are able to see where students are at and records can be connected for siblings. It is an extremely effective and useful tool at the teacher level, school level, and district level. We have been very pleased with its implementation in our school district and constantly get positive feedback about its effectiveness. However, in addition to just using it at the school level - its interface allows students and families to access the network as well for their own child. Parents can go in and check grades, see direct messages from teachers, check for missing assignments, etc. It's been very useful for all of us.
- It allows a family-friendly interface that connects the teachers, school and parents to share information about assignments and grades with current and real-time updated information.
- It allows schools to be able to connect siblings in families by showing where other children within the same family are located.
- It allows a messaging option so that teachers can communicate with parents and guardians and students of multiple classes all at the same time.
- It allows multi-class grading that helps teachers be able to implement assignments that apply to more than one class but not all.
- 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.