Blackbaud "ON" - a GREAT solution for your school
March 26, 2018
Blackbaud "ON" - a GREAT solution for your school
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud K-12 “ON” Solutions
Our school uses Blackbaud K-12 "ON" across the organization. We use "ON" for our website, email communications, teacher websites, grading, registrar, scheduling, School Information System (SIS), Admissions, and we integrate with Smart Tuition for student billing. It has been wonderful for our teachers, who find the platform easier than FAWeb for grading. Our parents and students log into the school website far more frequently than they did before because the site is user-friendly and contains valuable information (upcoming assignments, easy access to grades, upcoming events, robust calendar). Student billing and collections, which used take up a lot of time for one of our employees, is now a non-issue, freeing that employee to do different things. We use less paper than we used to. We communicate better with our families.
- Presentation of information: the website is nicely structured to display pertinent information to the user, based on the user type. For instance, it is easy for parents to see information pertaining to their student(s) and access resource specific to parents. Students have a different default view, showing their classes, grades, and easy access to their schedule. Faculty gets yet another view, with their daily schedule and easy access to attendance and grading system.
- The messaging system has revolutionized the way faculty communicates with students. Before, faculty would email students, but students were not checking emails regularly. Now, they send messages through the website messaging system. Since students are logging into the site so frequently, they see those messages more quickly than they would see emails.
- The forms system is great. Instead of sending paper forms to parents (e.g., re-enrollment contract, updated student health history, permission for field trips, permission for social media inclusion, bus rider signup, etc.), we now push online forms to the parents. All input is captured in the system. The systems auto-reminds parents who have not yet filled out the forms. This saves paper and a lot of employee time.
- Grading review could be better. It's not as user-friendly as we would like for division heads to review grades and comments submitted by faculty. Also, when writing comments, teachers would like to be able to see comments written in prior quarters.
- Report card formatting is limited. We would love more flexibility in formatting.
- Online assessments could be better. For instance, math teachers would like to be able to include math formulae.
- We have definitely seem time savings for employees. Student Billing is now handled by the system instead of an employee. Forms management is handled by the system - no need to manually remind parents to fill out forms.
- Communicating with students is vastly improved. We can send a message and feel pretty confident the student will read it. In the past, we had to physically deliver messages to students, or set up Remind to contact them via cell phone.