FAQs

Edsby is a K-12-specific software developer. It has three primary products:

• The Edsby digital learning platform: a comprehensive social learning environment for K-12. Edsby gives school districts, states and provinces or national governments a powerful, single application to facilitate their K-12 digital transformations. More detail.
• Edsby Destinations: a scalable, competency-based assessment and reporting system for K-12 districts and state governments that helps educators, students, and families clearly understand what students are learning and where they are headed. Aligned to local outcome frameworks, it provides real-time visibility into progress and supports authentic learning at scale. Read more.
• Edsby SignWave: a forms and workflow system that makes digital forms work for everyone in K-12. It allows automation of multi-level approval chains to enable complex K-12 workflows, including the field trip lifecycle with unique “Boarding Pass” features for real-time student tracking on trips. Learn more.

The Edsby digital learning platform has been developed specifically for the needs of K-12 school districts, regional governments and certain private independent schools. It is not developed for or marketed to higher education, corporate learning, individual public schools or home schools where other solutions are readily available.

Here are some organizations using Edsby.

A list of some customers and quotes about what they think of Edsby can be found here.

Read in depth Edsby customer profiles here.

Read short Edsby customer profiles here.

Edsby is designed just for K-12. Other systems also try to service corporate and higher learning. Edsby’s specialization in K-12 allows it to do things critical to K-12, such as smart parent communication, collaboration and approvals, parent-teacher conference scheduling, report card workflow and much more across a whole region. Detail here.

Edsby also has a very broad scope of what it believes K-12 needs in a single platform. See our comparisons.

If you’re a teacher, Edsby streamlines grading, attendance, parent communication and other administrivia, freeing more time for teaching. And it gives you new ways to make your class shine. Read more.

If you’re a parent, Edsby lets you see what’s happening with your kids at school, and helps you play a more active part in your childrens’ education. Read more.

If you’re a school or district administrator, Edsby provides in-depth information on every student and their status, and gives you great new ways to engage parents. Read more.

If you’re an IT professional, Edsby interfaces elegantly with your legacy systems for quick deployment and easy ongoing administration. Read more.

If you’re a student, Edsby is the easy way to stay up on what’s happening at school and how you’re doing. Read more.

If you’re a school district administrator, district or provincial/state-level level instructional technology or IT professional and would like to evaluate Edsby, we’d like to show it to you. Contact sales for a demo.

At minimum, Edsby needs to talk with a student information/management system, or SIS/SMS, to do what it does. Optionally, it usually also connects to local, district or regional authentication systems (like LDAP or Active Directory), often an HR system and sometimes even other structured data.

Yes, by default. Most districts/regions want their SIS/SMS and other existing systems like authentication and HR to remain their primary databases, so Edsby pushes and pulls information to and from them as necessary. If your region wants Edsby to retain some information, that’s possible, too.

Edsby goes far beyond the simple parent portal or grade sharing add-ons offered by many student information or management systems. Users can use any modern web browser without any plug-ins, or apps for iOS and Android. Even better, because Edsby can work with any SIS/SMS, standardizing on Edsby gives you the flexibility to change your master database in the future without having to change the user experience for teachers, students and parents.

Let contrast Edsby with your SIS/SMS’s features in a demo.

Yes. Details on Google here. And Microsoft here.

Yes. Customization is one of Edsby’s core differentiators. We’ll implement your school or district’s existing assessment schemes for your gradebook and report cards. And we’ll reproduce your existing report card as part of our initial integration. Other customization, including custom reports like progress reports, etc., is charged for. We can describe timing and costing in a written proposal.

Edsby’s systems tie closely with a district or region’s existing systems of record to do the many things they do. So, unlike other systems, potential users cannot simply register an account and try them. To experience Edsby, Edsby Destinations or Edsby SignWave at your institution, invite your instructional technology or IT staff to contact us and we’ll work with them to perform a proper evaluation.

If you’re a student, teacher or parent at a school or district that already uses an Edsby system, ask the office at your school for the information you need in order to log in. Because of the confidentiality of academic data, it’s not as simple as just setting up your own account. There are special processes.

There are up-front charges for initial integration. There are also annual costs, variable with the number of students. Edsby does not charge for parent, teacher and administrator accounts.

Pricing for the Edsby digital learning platform starts at $5 per student per year. Pricing for core versions of Edsby Destinations and Edsby SignWave start at $2 per student per year.

Certain other features and advanced functionality are charged for annually. And the effective per-user price for small organizations like private schools, with fewer than 2,000 users, is much higher. Contact Edsby sales for full details.

Edsby’s systems can pay for themselves in the first year on the basis of savings from paper, toner and printer maintenance alone, because far fewer assignments and notices home need to be printed. Additional savings are realized from reduced printing of student agendas, integrated attendance, grade book and report cards, lesson planning, parent portal features, parent teacher conference scheduling, parent approval workflow and online testing. Our return on investment calculator tool shows just how much your district or region can save with Edsby based on your number of students, teachers, parents, schools and other inputs.

Contact Edsby sales for a custom quote meeting your site’s unique requirements.

An Edsby implementation can be completed in a few months, from beginning to production. Contact us for details.

Yes. If a school or district hasn’t already collected parent information of its students, Edsby’s self-service parent registration can be used to do so. Of course, the education organization maintains ownership of this data. Edsby makes no claim to any data collected on behalf of customers.

Customers own all data collected by Edsby. Customers are welcome to export any data at any time. More information on data and privacy here.

No. Edsby does not monetize its customers’ data. Edsby does nothing with student data except manage it as directed by our customers. For details on how Edsby handles data, read About Edsby & Your Data, as well as our Usage Policy and Services Privacy Policy.

The help section of our website describes how different roles should seek help with Edsby.

Edsby includes basic training for professional staff in each new Edsby implementation. Additional training services are available. Contact us.