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.

There's no better system than Edsby for sharing K-12 district, school and class news.
I like that I can use Edsby to communicate daily with parents. It's great for organizing and reporting student progress.
Adam Dougall, Teacher / Greater Essex County District School Board, 35,000 students and 4,500 staff on Edsby

Connect two-ways with your community

Modern communications with your stakeholders that’s light years beyond paper in backpacks.
Enable parents to notify the office of a planned absence with a simple online form in Edsby.

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.

Edsby is a great tool to communicate! Easy to access all kids and staff and parents! 10/10
Kimberly Leger, Teacher / Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board, 34,000 students and 3,450 staff on 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.

Parent view - Edsby mobile app; monitor multiple children with single login.
Parent view - Edsby mobile app; monitor multiple children with single login.
I like that parents have the ability to be as involved as they want in what is happening at their child's school. It's easy to use from an administrative perspective, and also from a parent perspective.
Danielle Appleby, Administrative Assistant / King's Christian College

Easier for teachers & parents

Edsby does heavy lifting behind the scenes.
Sync Edsby to your master parent data... or compile a parent database using Edsby.

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

Edsby

How the Edsby platform compares against others for community engagement

Canvas Brightspace Schoology Moodle Google Classroom Microsoft Teams Seesaw
News distribution
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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 Unison 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.

Ready to learn more about how Edsby could help you?