Schoolbox Erfahrungen

There are so many things to love!

Schoolbox has positively changed our entire culture of our College. Our communication has been dramatically streamlined. The thousands of parents in our community receive their messages from one point and are happier than they were when we used a SharePoint instance.

The ability to bring all of the online systems that we use to one place (our Schoolbox instance) is saving us time. Schoolbox allows us to create templates of our pages, and so our community know where on the page the information they are looking for is no matter what page they are viewing. These two factors alone have saved us thousands of hours in our classrooms.

Our staff love the fact that the courses are saved and reused from year to year. They love the drag and drop nature of content creation and the fact that the existing work can be dragged into Schoolbox. It means that they do not have to start everything from scratch. They can still use the content that was existing before we went into Schoolbox. Of course, they are also using the new implementation as a way to audit the existing content and refresh it as they need to.

The ability to offer secure group spaces to our extra-curricular groups such as student clubs and parent groups is a feature we have never been able to provide before.

Finally, I have to offer praise to the Schoolbox Support Staff who work hard to support us in making our Schoolbox instance very successful in our College.

The administration area can take a little while to learn. It is a very complex area. However, only superusers use this space, so most users never have to deal with it. There is a lot of support available to assist superusers. Schoolbox Support staff and the Professional Services Team are only a phone call away if I ever need help.

- Once you know how to maintain the product, it is highly configurable which enables the pages to be tailored to meet College's requirements.
- The product is rich in functionality but the good news is you can phase the implementation of this in line with College's requirements and timeframes.

- It currently doesn't integrate with our School Management System - TASS.
- On the UPS, there is internal processing which is not visible to administrators of the systems which has caused us challenges with our data.

Our Schoolbox instance is fast, reliable and readily available. Our School has been able to embed Schoolbox as our Learning Management System, Community Portal, Continuous feedback and is now our main communication platform.

The support of the software (both technical and professional learning) is timely with high resolution success. The team is knowledgeable, friendly and responsive.

We have had extensive requests by our school community to allow for printable reporting functions - specially in the Grades and Feedback modules.

Feature requests on the core components can be time consuming as the process involves a voting system by other Schoolbox customers for buy in. Being a long term customer and user of the system we find ourselves more advanced than other School's who may not be ready for other feature request changes.

There are three standout features of Schoolbox:
1. It is an all-in-one solution for teaching and learning, staff intranet and school communications
2. It is an Australian product, built by Australian educators for the Australian school market
3. The Schoolbox community is highly skilled and generous with their knowledge

Queensland curriculum compliancy remains an issue

The ease of use for storing information that is shared with multiple students across multiple platforms. The customisation of the product allows us to use only the features that we want and to trial those features that are new to the LMS during different releases. The best thing about SchoolBox is the network of users who regularly problem solve and develop solutions in a collaborative way.

There is considerable time being spent trying to ensure the product talks to our school wide administration system. Having said that we knew this would be an ongoing problem on both vendors sides and were prepared for the delays that are occurring.

- customer service is excellent. They are always able or willing to work to resolve an issue
- their road map is inspiring and focuses on the educational benefit of using an LMS
- willing to customise the base product for a fee
- not afraid to share data location in the schema

- supporting custom work. After paying for custom work to the base product, any future releases on the base product may impact the custom work. This incurs an additional cost on the customer to adjust the custom work to meet the changes. Please note Schoolbox is very clear about this before agreeing to any custom work.

The Schoolbox community is excellent. The company has established a culture and framework that is very effective in supporting learning through collaboration. We have only just started out with Schoolbox but already I have found the regional user forums and annual national conferences to be excellent opportunities to learn from company representatives and from the experience of colleagues in other schools. The software itself has enormous functionality, spanning a wide range of school operations. The design reflects a deep understanding of how schools operate and it functions very reliably. Schoolbox is a sophisticated yet relatively simple tool to mange complexity in schools.

The greatest challenge with this software in our first year has been the training aspect around the 'course builder' component. In particular, teacher understanding of the relationship between 'course builder', 'course outline' and importing classes and course outlines. Related to this is the process of submitting assessment with course builder. That concept and process lacks a bit of 'stickability' for busy teachers so it is important to support teachers through training. Once teachers have a grasp of this aspect of Schoolbox, there is no stopping them.

Schoolbox is designed from the ground up to be intuitive, allowing the novice or the seasoned digital pedagogy practitioner to jump in and building learning activities and courses. In particular, the Schoolbox team listens to its user base when planning its product development road map: this has led to a feature set that supports personalised learning, including rich assessment rubrics, student self-reflection and feedback, modified assessments, social learning, as well as a survey tool that supports Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

The support for Learning Analytics and the analytics around teachers' use of the product is still fairly nascent. One has to instead look to third party tools to provide this capability.

The platform brings together many systems that we previously maintained separately. For example, calendar, news, communication, teaching resources, gradebook, assessment calendar and collaborative tools are now in one place. This has significantly streamlined workflow for everyone but is also a lot more intuitive and has allowed us to create stronger systems. For example, online submission of due work means that all work can be submitted electronically on the one day, is automatically checked for plagiarism, feedback can be delivered and fed back immediately and marks entered automatically into the gradebook. There is also much greater oversight on an individuals total workload and the ability to more effectively manage this. The platform has significantly changed some core workplace systems and in some cases has positively impacted on the culture of "how things are done". It's a "one stop shop" for school communication, collaboration, grading, resources, assessment and feedback.

There are still some areas of the gradebook which we would like tweaked for the platform to work ideally for us. In an LMS with such a wide scope, there will always be some features which are not 100% tailored to an individual school's needs. Over a 6 year relationship, we have found the company to be wonderfully responsive and adaptive to the needs of the users and are confident that this area will soon be addressed by the software engineers.

Schoolbox has allowed us to develop and roll out a platform that provides a one-stop-shop for students, staff and parents. The support staff are incredibly supportive, responding to requests in a timely and helpful manner. Their commitment to customer support is one of the best I have ever encountered. Through their open communication channels, we have been able to request features and services that find their way in to future releases. The ability to quickly embed a variety of resources has allowed us to create an engaging instance that has received much support from all key stakeholders in our school.

It's hard to identify any cons, but for us here in Queensland, I felt that Schoolbox was a bit slow to provide software changes to facilitate changes to the senior schooling system. With that in mind though, our Account Manager and various support staff were quick to provide assistance when we requested it.

Extends teaching pedagogy
Good technical support.
Extensive range of features.
Integration with Synergetic.
File handling, especially video files.
Homepage creation is balanced between ease of use and customisation.
Price competitive.

Not able to copy class pages.
Most users will need initial training.

I really appreciate the philosophy behind the software. Schoolbox as a company is working hard to provide schools with sound pedagogical practices, not just gimmicks. As a teacher, I particularly appreciate the ability to track student learning and keep records of that learning through the Course Outline. I love the surveys and polls components for feedback on the learning process, both for students and for my own reflective practice. As an administrator of the platform, I particularly value the connectedness that can be built for the school community through targeted and individualised notifications and groups. All stakeholders, whether they be staff, students or parents, are getting a bespoke experience with information that is relevant to them.

There are a couple of integrations that probably don't work as well for us yet. The similarity check isn't comparable to another product we currently use; this presents some difficulties in getting staff to move to Schoolbox, but other features counteract this.

Schoolbox provides schools with the communication, classroom management and community building capabilities they need to flourish in the Australian educational context. It is responsive and highly adaptable and is built upon a deep understanding of what Australian schools need.

The App just needs to scale a little better for iOS devices

We like the ease of use for students, staff and parents.
Customisation of the dashboard for various audiences.
Relative ease of management for staff and administrators.
Powerful communications tool for community.
Allows students access to curriculum and extra-curricula information anywhere, anytime.
Allows the College to provide relevant messaging to parents.

Permissions structure does not always allow full administrative control. eg. sometimes easy for staff to accidentally delete an item which requires Schoolbox to restore.

I love the way Schoolbox changed the way our teachers and students think about online learning. Schoolbox has become the actual classroom. The class pages have become their whiteboard and classroom posters, and the course and unit pages have become their live strategic planning documents. It is exciting to see teachers eyes light up when they realize they can do the work once, do it well, and move onto the next thing in their extensive list of things to do.

Coming from a different LMS product, there was a steep learning curve to alter the way teachers were thinking about online learning with Schoolbox (though it has been totally worth it).