Alma SIS

Avantages

C'est un excellent logiciel de gestion des cours et d'inscription des étudiants.Il favorise la gestion de l'admissibilité de chaque étudiant.

Inconvénients

Moi personnellement je ne rencontre aucun problème avec le logiciel

Avantages

As a teacher I can say that Alma is one of the best virtual classrooms that I have tried, it is an all-in-one and something that I love is the management of evaluations and students without having to resort to any other external platform.
The function that I use the most is evaluative management since right there I can check my lists for the student report card system as well as the grade assigned to the same task and document

Inconvénients

It is difficult to say that Alma has something bad, rather something not so good and that is first-hand integration, but once learned it is phenomenal

Avantages

It is an intuitive student management system, and their customer service can't be beat!

Inconvénients

We would like to get more student information entered via Alma Start to migrate to Alma SIS - I think they are working on these updates though!

Avantages

I like that I can look up any student in our school and see that student's schedule and current information.

Inconvénients

1. Our students (Seniors especially) cannot get their current transcripts. This is troubling for many reasons. Perhaps the most important being their choices for scholarships and higher education will be affected by this. Students cannot apply for financial assistance through scholarships without current transcripts. I have personally spoken with at least three students who have missed out on scholarship opportunities, simply because they cannot access current transcripts.
2. Can't see overall student GPA
3. Can't see student class rank
4. Student Mobile usage is very confusing. Can't see grades the way they should.
5. Ease of access is horrible
6. No mobile app, and mobile website is very difficult to read
7. Not organized well
8. When emailing "all students" I cannot exclude certain classes; I can't email multiple classes at once without including EVERYONE
9. For attendance, it is very confusing. If a student is marked present first class, they are marked present for the entire day. This was clearly set up for use in an Elementary School. High School is different. We need to be able to see where our students are throughout the day.
10. Inputting grades takes many more steps than our previous system. There is no way to toggle between students with the keyboard.
11. There should be a way to block certain people from seeing certain information. At the beginning of the school year, student Social Security Numbers were viewable by any teacher or staff in our building.

Avantages

It's a very professional and easy to use platform

Inconvénients

The price is high compared to the features needed for our use

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Alma SIS

Avantages

I LOVE the customer service, everyone is very personable and quick to respond. My questions are answered completely and I am always directed to where I can find answers to my questions. The program is very easy to use and, typically, I can figure out most issues I am having using the resource pages.

Inconvénients

It might be lack of knowledge on our end, but the teachers are not happy with the standardized grading in Alma. I would also like to be able to allow more detailed access to only certain teachers with specified things.

Avantages

Alma is easier than our former software and allows us to use our Standards Based Grading which is our priority. Parents were able to quickly learn how to use the system and the attendance feature is great. Students were also able to learn the system and although it doesn't have a comprehensive calendar with their schedules and our school activities, they were able to use the daily tab to track their classes.

Inconvénients

The calendar is static and unable to be exported to phones/other calendars so we had to create an app for that. The reports are not as in-depth as needed and we aren't able to save our filters/criteria that we use often. They are still working on SBG reporting so many items we aren't able to track as we typically do through reports. The report card set up is limited for what we need in our report cards; we had to use every work-around to get a report card as we needed, but they do work now.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Alma SIS 

Pourquoi passer à Alma SIS

Avantages

I don't have a lot to compare ALMA to, but I feel that the user interface is very intuitive. After light training, I felt that I was able to navigate the software with ease, and perform many of the functions without having to struggle to do so. The resources for questions called the "study guide" has really good searchable articles and videos that addressed almost every issue I had. If I couldn't find the answer, the support staff was quick to respond and help with a solution.

Inconvénients

Education is so vastly different from one school to the next. On the similar needs of schools I think ALMA performs great, but for specific needs or differences they struggle to meet all our needs. Many times we have to find a work-around for issues we are having. I will add that this is very rare. A specific example is that we can search students by grade. We can search specific classes, but not the whole grade. There are times it would be beneficial to see all the students in one grade.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Alma SIS 

Logiciel antérieur 

Pourquoi passer à Alma SIS

Avantages

The main selling point from Alma was the ease of use. Out of all of the systems I've demoed and tried, it was easily the easiest to log in, poke around, and figure out how to do what I needed to do with minimal training.

The second selling point is their customer service. Absolutely top notch. Their people are friendly, very responsive, and (most importantly) humans. I enjoy talking to them! I can usually get a response from a rep within minutes and even our teachers are welcome to message them with questions.

The third selling point is that they are new system with a considerably active development cycle. We knew, going into it, that they wouldn't be as fully fleshed out as competitors like PowerSchool. That also means that it's easier for newer and fresher ideas to be implemented. It's not built on some old archaic database. Many of the features they do have that I use regularly such as the Report Card Builder and the Spreadsheet Data Editor/Report builder are very well done. We regularly get emails about new features being added and they listen to their customers when new features are requested. They've given us a lot of new toys since we first signed on with them.

The final selling point is narwhals.

Inconvénients

Probably the biggest issue that I face regularly is that their district level stuff isn't as fleshed out as I would like it to be. Many of the cool features that are available at each of the schools I manage can't be done in the district portion, aggregating all data and whatnot. I've been told they are working on that stuff though!

Avantages

Alma is very easy to learn and to use. It has a lot of great features that make it flexible for the needs of different schools. Most importantly, the customer service is fantastic. They get back to you quickly, are helpful, even pleasant with some of my "stupid" questions to which I should know the answer and are open to ideas for improvements and new features.

Inconvénients

Some may wish for an "all-in-one" SIS/LMS system. Alma is more an SIS+ with some features that would allow a school to get away without an LMS, but certainly not all the features one would find in a combined SIS/LMS system. However, I think this is a good thing, as it provides flexibility to meet the needs of particular schools. For example, we are a Google Classroom school and don't currently use a full featured LMS such as Schoology or Canvas.

Avantages

This product is very easy to use, in real time and easy to understand. Novel users can open up this SIS program and navigate in order to find the information they are looking for.

Inconvénients

We were one of the first public schools to sign on with ALMA, therefore we have evolved with the company. There have been some growing pains as we have evolved. The tech support teams have been gracious and very helpful in keeping us up to speed and rolling.

Avantages

This is a pretty good product, not perfect, but good.
The most useful part here is the link to google classroom for grading. This helps me be able to give feedback in one place and have it connected to my students and their parents.

The parts that would be nicer for our specific use would be if Alma would be able to be linked to Atlas, Inc. this is what our school uses for different organizational goals.

Inconvénients

There have been a few glitches in the system that our administration has run into. First dealing with the report cards for 6th grade did not work out with the Semester 1 Reports. So we had to give the parents the Nine weeks report cards for our school.

The one part that is disappointing is the link does not work with standards based grading. This problem does not stem from Alama, but is from Google not doing standards based grades.

Other than that it has worked much better than the Power School System we had in place before.

Avantages

Being able to customize information within student records has been very helpful. Standard reports included generally provide needed information, but creating a custom report is also pretty easy.

Inconvénients

Would love to be able to view by grade level rather than having to pick students individually or using the data spreadsheet editor.

Avantages

I really like this experience and it always works well with me and really easy to use.

Inconvénients

Till now I didn't find any cons . It really covers all I was looking for .

Avantages

The most impactful features of a product depend on a variety of factors such as the type of product and the industry it serves. Generally, features that provide the most value to customers, such as ease of use and integration with existing business processes, are most impactful. Additionally, features that provide a significant advantage over competitors, such as advanced analytics or automation, are also likely to be very impactful.

Inconvénients

I feel that the product could be improved by adding a feature to allow users to easily customize the look and feel of their project dashboard. It would be helpful to have more options for customizing the layout and design of the dashboard. Additionally, it can be difficult to find specific tasks within a project or to quickly filter tasks. It would be great to have a feature to allow users to quickly filter tasks by keyword or tag. Integration with existing business processes could also be improved by providing more options for integrating with external services, such as Slack or Google Calendar.

Avantages

The use of use and finding what is needed in a quick and timely fashion.

Inconvénients

The inability to pre label assessments in categories.

Avantages

Alma integrated well with Google Apps and provided integrations with other third party software. The interface and design were well thought out with the end-user in mind. Running reports and editing the data are easy and intuitive - and those are the most important aspects of an SIS. The support was excellent, and always available through the Alma Academy.

Inconvénients

We would like a module that would allow our cafeteria software to integrate so parents could see their child's lunch balance in the same place they view their child's schedule, teacher, and fees. There were also growing pains, as state-required data collections differ in every state and sometimes this meant there were duplicate or similar data fields that confused some of our clerical staff.

Avantages

Alma has a great user interface! It is much more intuitive, FUN, and easy to use than the software we were using previously. It really shines in the LMS arena. Our registrar is very happy with how the class configuration, grades, report cards, etc. work in Alma. Our teachers appreciate the ease of use and the integration with Google Classroom. Our parents appreciate not having to pay for the app. We appreciate that so far there aren't a lot of extra add-ons that you have to pay for. The pricing tiers are very straightforward. They roll out new features/functionality regularly.

Inconvénients

Because Alma started as an LMS and added SMS/SIS functionality, you can see that it shines the most in LMS functions. There have been quite a few data fields that we were accustomed to using in our old system that do not exist in Alma. You can pay extra to have them developed/added, but there is no way to do that yourself. As for reports, there are good default reports in the system, and you can do a fair amount of custom reports, but it is not as comprehensive as we had hoped. We wish Alma had a way to give parents access to directory information (of other parents in their grade or the whole school. We wish it had a way for parents to enter/track their volunteer hours. We wish it had more functionality in the emergency contact/ medical information. We wish it had a more robust lesson planning capability.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Alma SIS 

Logiciel antérieur 

Pourquoi passer à Alma SIS

Avantages

Alma is easy to set up and use, which is essential in a school environment. The different features are intuitive and my staff needed minimal training and support before fully utilizing the product.

Inconvénients

I do wish some things could be customized further. For example, in Myanmar students do not have first and last names, so if we could change to a single naming field that would be really helpful. Similarly, I would appreciate the ability to customize other demographic data such as race, ethnicity, and languages.

Avantages

You can log in quickly. The people who have come in to assist with how horrific this year has been have been mostly humble and at least tried to help.

Inconvénients

Absolutely impossible to have what we need at our hands as high school counselors. Everything is laborious or actually impossible to do. It has taken MONTHS to get even tiny bits of advances to make this usable. Transcripts, which are an essential piece for our kids, took 6 months to have functioning, and they're still inaccurate. Scheduling is months behind because the programming is inept for a school this size. It lacks confidentiality and privacy that's important for our students. Household units are not available, access to other buildings makes it impossible to know who has siblings and other people living in their home, which poses a safety issue when filing reports to CPS, report cards are still completely wrong and inaccurate. I could truly go on for an awfully long time, but I digress.

At the end of the day, I think I can vouch for every person in my building when I say that this program was rolled out in a deplorable way, changes and improvements are slow and sometimes non-existent, and it's made me reconsider even working in this corporation due to how terrible this system is. A program in its infancy has been detrimental to every single stakeholder in this corporation, and I've been disappointed since the first day of training in August.

Avantages

First of all, I liked how often improvements were made throughout the year. It seemed that ALMA was always looking for ways to continue to improve the software in order to make it more user friendly. As a PE teacher, my grading system is quite different from the classroom teacher. I have 19 different classes (K-6) with about 30 students in each class. Each class would attend PE 2x each week. At first, it was very arduous to submit all the grades, one student at a time, at the end of each term. One of the improvements that occurred during this past school year, was to be able to submit an entire class's grades at the same time! That one change lightened my work load tremendously! And made it so I looked forward to doing grades instead of dreading it!

Inconvénients

As I became more familiar with the features of the software, I became more comfortable using it, but I regret that it took me into my 2nd year using it, to become the most comfortable. Even so, the thing I liked the least about using this software was when I needed to make changes to the lesson details and maneuvering around the different tabs was a but cumbersome to have. Too many steps to have to make the changes I needed to. Hope that makes sense. Thanks!

Avantages

1) The features that where the most impactful:
-Attendance and Report Cards

2.) Is the product easy to use?
-The learning curve was a little steep in the beginning, but because of fantastic customer support, all concerns were quickly answered and solutions were given/suggested that solved the problems.

3.) Was the integration with your existing business processes easy?
-Teachers found it easy to use overall.

Inconvénients

1.) Are there features you feel are missing or could be improved?
a.) Finer granular control over the lay-outing of the templates.
b.) Ability to add drop-down dates in some places.
c.) Manual inputting of each teacher’s class schedules for all grade levels is tedious. Alma should have a built-in feature of uploading .CSV files for creating and updating class schedules instead of using an optional 3rd party service.
d.) The sandboxed sites for testing the look and feel of creating classes and report cards are geared for US school systems and not for international school systems, and which I did not find very useful.
e.) There should be a feature during the initial set-up of the school year to allow certain weekends that can be ticked-off as part of the school year.

2.) Are there aspects of the product that are difficult to use?
-ALMA Start (for creating online school enrollment forms, online parent info access, etc.) is a little complicated to learn and implement without a sandboxed testing environment when the school year has already started.

Avantages

Alma integrates our administrative processes into one, easy to use program that both parents and teachers love!

Inconvénients

The financial/billing component is not as comprehensive as we need.

Avantages

Alma has a modern interface that is intuitive for our users with all of the information they need right at their fingertips, or one screen away. The student/parent portal is informative and is enabling us to move toward a more paperless registration process. Our teachers love the communication tools built into their grade book that enable them to immediately reach out to a student and their parents without having to jump out of the work they are doing. The report card and grading systems are flexible enough to support both traditional and proficiency-based philosophies. Alma is also proactive in cultivating relationships with third party vendors to add additional functionality to the environment. Alma has also been proactive in monitoring our state reporting requirements and updating our state report templates which is no small task. And Alma's support team is nothing short of amazing. My teachers have the freedom to reach out and get the support they require and that is priceless.

Inconvénients

There were a few features I would have like that did not come "out of the box" such as robust reporting tools, and built-in scheduling tools. That said, Alma has worked to integrate those into the system and future users will not have that problem. The one other piece that I believe is in process is updating the transcript system so that it employs the same interface as the report card generator.

Avantages

Alma has a very clean aesthetic with intuitively easy to use. The customer service is top-notch. Even during the pandemic, the response time has been exceptional. The techs are supportive, humorous, collegial, yet professional. Really happy with this platform.

Inconvénients

I am looking forward to their continued build-out of the transcript function of their platform. They register all suggestions with their engineers, and once they get enough "up votes" they add them to the next roll-out. Can't ask for a more egalitarian system of continuous improvement.