Edsby for Community Engagement
Edsby picks up where systems like Google Classroom and Seesaw leave off.
K-12 students’ outcomes improve when their parents or guardians are involved. Family support is needed now more than ever. But occasional emails summarizing a child’s latest grades aren’t parent engagement. Let alone collaboration. How does your app, or apps, compare with the social features of the Edsby platform for K‑12?
Community sharing & involvement in school life
Convene your community inside a safe, managed “walled garden.” Share safely, and even discuss hard topics free from interruptions from outsiders.
District, School and Class news
In K-12, there’s class news, like upcoming field trips. There’s school news, like snow days or assemblies. There’s official district news, like pandemic masking policies, which may or may not appear on the district website, too, assuming people even read it. Different educators manage each level. Only Edsby gives K-12 organizations a well-thought out framework with permissions and workflows for distributing news to their communities.
Groups for clubs, teams & more
PLCs, teams and clubs can get their own special areas. Edsby Groups are richer than anything similar anywhere, with their own collaboration, polls, document sharing, storage, wiki-like knowledge base, calendars and more.
Every group has at least one staff moderator, so educators can always shape what the community is discussing and curate conversations.
Edsby Groups can give new immediacy and relevancy to Parent-Teacher Association and similar conversations. Enable everyone to participate at a time that suits all parents that want to be involved. Field questions and answers in a safe, closed forum where everyone participates when they can.
Connect two-ways with your community
Modern communications with your stakeholders that’s light years beyond paper in backpacks.
Messaging
Teachers and parents can message privately. Send broadcasts by class, grade, teacher, club/group or more. Distribution lists are maintained automatically so teachers don’t have to themselves.
Planned absences
If a student isn’t going to be in class, parents can use Edsby to officially notify the school. Integrates with district’s attendance system.
Parent-teacher conference scheduling
Edsby can facilitate parent teacher conferences. Edsby can serve as the district’s master system for setting dates and times for parents to meet with their children’s teachers using whatever schedule the district has adopted. Meetings can be performed online via Edsby using Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet or even a phone.
Registrations and approvals
With optional registrations and approvals, custom workflows like field trip approvals and kindergarten registration are possible with Edsby.
Status of learning progress
Realtime insight into a child’s academic status.
Current student achievement, attendance, schedules… even location
Edsby shows parents everything about their kids up to the minute. Even what class they’re supposed to be in right now, in what room #, and if they were marked present or late. If teachers share grades, parents see them instantly. If students have homework, they can’t claim otherwise.
For younger kids, Edsby gives parents a gateway into their child’s activities so they can see evidence of their learning. Teachers can share photos, videos, lesson plans and journals capturing classroom activities.
Timetable & calendar
Edsby can serve as the official district calendar for parents and students, even driving what appears on the district website. While populated straight from the district SIS, it displays students’ schedules in a more modern, attractive way than most SISes. Parents always know what day of any complicated multi-day period rotation it might be.
Real time notifications
If something changes, parents don’t have to wait for an end of day (or week) email. Their cell phone can ping the moment a teacher shares a grade, or marks their child absent or late.
Parents get their own accounts
Unlike other systems, Edsby gives them their own accounts to follow their kids’ education and communicate with teachers and staff.
Easier for teachers & parents
Edsby does heavy lifting behind the scenes.
Automatic enrolment in groups
Edsby can enrol educators, students and parents into correct group conversations when their data changes in master systems, like the SIS (ie – all principals, all Grade 9 teachers, all parents, all students in grade 9, etc.)
Build out official parent databases
Many districts don’t have good contact info for their parents or formal ways to engage them electronically yet. Edsby can enable districts to build their database of parents and associate them securely with their children’s data.
Single app
With Edsby, teachers and parents only need one app for everything related to teaching and learning. Parents no longer need to use multiple apps to follow their kids’ education, saving frustration for everyone!
You could use…
Email to message parents
Broadcast system to share mass school messaging and attendance
SIS to share grades
Google Classroom for homework & class news
School websites for school news
District website for district news
Seesaw for learning evidence
Social media for community conversations
Or you could use
How the Edsby platform compares against others for community engagement
 |
Canvas | Brightspace | Schoology | Moodle | Google Classroom | Microsoft Teams | Seesaw | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| News distribution | 4 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
2 |
1 |
| User news determined by orgs & role | 4 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
2 |
0 |
| Participation in groups as allowed by staff | 4 |
1 |
0 |
4 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
| Built-in support for parents by design | 4 |
0 |
0 |
4 |
0 |
2 |
0 |
4 |
| All children visible from single parent account | 4 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
0 |
0 |
4 |
| Permission forms | 4 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
| Parents can report planned absences | 4 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
With Edsby platform features
Groups
Powerful ways for students, teachers and parents to collaborate. Convenient, secure & effective. Can be closed or open to an entire school, or even a school district or region. Open them to everyone or only make visible to specified roles (e.g. only teachers.) Ideal for teams, clubs, PD & more.
Confidential Messages
Teachers can email students, parents or anyone else in the district. No email addresses or address book needed. Addresses sync from official systems.
Launchpad To Other Resources
The Edsby Launchpad can be configured by the school, district or region to link educators to other approved well-being or SEL-related resources, such as licensed professional development curriculum.
Permission Forms
Teachers can send field trip permission and other requests to parents. Teachers receive a running list of parents who’ve responded. Permission slips are never lost.
Parent Support by Design
Great parent support was built into Edsby from day one. Parents aren’t an afterthought.
Flexible Account Setup
Parents can be imported from existing systems and lists. Or Edsby can be used to safely register and connect parent accounts to those of their children.
No Email Addresses
Parents and teachers don’t need to know each other’s email addresses to message each other. Teachers don’t need to manage parent email address books.
Parent Teacher Conference Booking
Schools and districts can use Edsby to manage parent teacher conference scheduling.
Full or Partial Visibility
Parents can see as much as, or as little as, a teacher chooses to show them about what’s happening in their class.
Voice and Video Comments
Parents can make encouraging voice and video comments on their children’s work, incl. Portfolio entries.
Planned Absences
Parents can use Edsby to schedule planned absences of their children from school.
…powered by 
technology
Two-way integration with legacy systems
Remarkable two-way sync with existing systems for student, teacher, class, daily schedule and other info. Connects with SISes/SMSes, HR databases, Excel files, CSVs and other structured data not normally available.
Single Sign-On
Use existing LDAP and/or Active Directory for user authentication. and perform Single Sign On (SSO) with Kerberos, oAuth, Google Workspace for Education or O365+Azure.
Data consolidation
Data from many sources can be consolidated and normalized. Proprietary and open protocols can then share data selectively with other systems consistent with customers’ policies.
Safety & Access Control
Designed for the unique needs of K-12, where safety of students & their data is paramount. Manages access of students, parents, teachers and school and district staff to ensure the right people get access to the right info.
LRS
A learning record store (LRS) tracks student activity within the system. Also tracks history of changes made to content. Enables powerful analytics.
Data sovereignty
A leading global Microsoft partner, Edsby is hosted in Microsoft Azure datacenters around the world. Customers’ sensitive student data stays in their region.
App Framework
Need something Edsby doesn’t do today? Custom apps can be built leveraging Edsby’s infrastructure. E.g. custom registrations, credit recovery, substitute teacher mgmt or more.
APIs
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are available for tight interoperability with other systems.
