A newspaper in the area of the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board in Ontario, Canada has published an article about local schools now using Edsby, with more schools soon coming on board. Close to 40,000 teachers and students, as well as parents and other guardians, will soon be using Edsby (see this announcement).
Cobourg Collegiate Institute (CCI) recently implemented Edsby as part of the rollout. The article cites CCI staff.
“[Edsby] brings it all together under one nice umbrella,” vice-principal Jamie Patenall summed up.
“It’s easy for staff to use, and it helps their ability to communicate with students and communicate with parents.”
Teachers needing parents to fill out permission forms for a field trip are using Edsby to post it for a parent to scan and e-mail back (or even print it off, sign it and send it in). They’re also finding it a great way to evaluate and professionally collaborate about and assist students individually in terms of grades, attendance or other areas of concern.
They’re benefiting from Edsby’s functions that assist teachers with grading, taking into account levels of instruction, grades to date, and all the data needed to sum up a student’s achievement into a grade, according to the writer.
CGI teacher Bruce LePage uses Edsby’s social media and group functions extensively, says the article.
LePage loves that creating polls is so easy. He recently polled one class on-line, for example, to see what aspects of climate change they were most worried about.
He is also excited about the ability to create on-line pages just for groups, like the school’s chess club. If a meeting changes or tournament information is announced, he said, it’s a snap to make sure everyone knows.
Group pages develop wherever the need is felt, he added. The International Baccalaureate teachers, Grade 10 teachers and English department, for example, have all created their own group sites.
CGI Principal Laina Andrews says Edsby excels in helping her find at-risk students, is easy to use, and may help reduce the need for other software in the district.
Establishing parameters for research is so easy, Andrews said. Whether it’s a list of all male students with an overall average of between 62 and 63 or a list of Grade 9 students who have been absent more than once in any given week, Andrews said, “you can drill down to anything.”
Andrews has found that Edsby is as easy and intuitive to use as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
“It has elements of all those things we are already familiar with,” she said.
Down the road, Andrews can see Edsby eliminating the need for individual teacher websites that are now in use. And school websites will exist only for providing the most basic information to members of the community who are not affiliated with the school.
Read the article in its entirety here.