Edsby for Student Well-Being

Powerful research-based technologies and strategies for the emotional health of K-12 students and teachers.

How are students’ current social emotional states affecting their ability to learn? Edsby enables students to share how they’re feeling with their teacher(s) and presents research-based strategies to help them regulate their emotions. It then gives educators ways to take action to help their students be as ready as possible to succeed.

Enable students to share how they’re feeling

A new, friendly way for kids to share things that might be hard to talk about.

Daily, or even per-class, emotional check-ins

Whether students are in class, hybrid or fully remote, Edsby now gives teachers a quick and easy way to poll students at the beginning of their day, or throughout the day, on how they’re feeling.

Age-appropriate selections and regulation strategies

Younger students don’t have the same emotion vocabulary or skills as older ones. So Edsby presents emotion options to choose from that are tailored to students’ grade levels, accompanied by developmentally appropriate definitions.

Suggested regulation strategies for each emotion, curated by experts, are also age appropriate.

Discover how ready your students are to learn

Find out what might be in the way of some students succeeding.

Specifically colored icons

Animated icons representing emotions are color-coded by SEL experts to represent emotion intensity level and how pleasant the emotion is. Teachers can see the types of emotions their students may be experiencing and quickly tell which students may need additional attention.

Spot outliers or trends

Teachers see when there are new check-ins and can monitor patterns and trends over time. They also see if a student has opted not to check in, which is a student’s valid choice.

Recommended teacher strategies

Teachers see what emotional regulation strategies have been presented to each student and receive their own professionally-curated strategies for educators based on what their students are feeling.

Confidential information

Edsby maintains students’ trust by keeping emotional check in information confidential between student and teacher.

Take action

Help make a difference in students’ well-being.

Prompt conversations

Even without a formal SEL program, the Edsby Check-In system gives students and teachers a way to start a dialogue around emotions. Teachers and students can communicate in Edsby, or face to face, and begin to build their emotion vocabulary literacy and their own personal toolkits of emotion regulation strategies to augment official SEL programs.

Ways to loop in other stakeholders

Edsby enables teachers to communicate privately with students and/or their parents, and/or guidance counsellors within the school’s same official, protected communications system.

360° view of students

In Edsby Check-Ins, a student’s Edsby Panorama is only ever a click away, including their comprehensive academic history, parent information, attendance records and more.

Ways to manage care

Students that might benefit from extra care can be grouped together for special educator attention. Edsby Monitor Groups, a long-established and appreciated feature of Edsby, can be set up as desired by teachers or guidance counsellors.

Edsby check-ins are like a "thermometer" to help tell teachers if kids might be sick. Other professionals can then intervene.

Latest social and emotional learning guidance

Strategies informed by decades of SEL and emotion research.
student well being
SEL professionals consulted on every aspect of the Edsby check-in system.

Designed with leading academics

User interface, icon color, age-appropriate emotion selection and culturally responsive regulation strategy content in Edsby Check-Ins come courtesy of a team of academic advisors and an exclusive relationship with MindUP—an evidence-based non-profit program designed to improve children’s emotional well-being founded by actress Goldie Hawn. MindUP is aligned with current SEL research and is accredited by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL.

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What we know in education is that "what is not assessed is not addressed." Now, more than ever, we need tools to measure children’s social and emotion competencies so we can identify where they are so that we can create learning opportunities to cultivate their social and emotional learning.
Dr. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, NoVo Foundation Endowed Chair in Social and Emotional Learning in the Department of Psychology / University of Illinois at Chicago

With Edsby platform features

Monitor Groups

Manage students needing special attention so educators can collaborate on strategies for success.

Panorama

On one screen, educators can access everything relating to a child’s education, incl. current grades, parent info, attendance, discipline, progress reports, learning evidence, IEPs, report cards, portfolio, alerts, schedule, teacher observations & more.

Confidential Messages

Teachers can email the student, their parents or guidance counsellor, all from the same system. No email address book management necessary.

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.

…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.

Edsby Check-Ins are only intended to initiate emotional dialogue between students and teachers. The process can help both develop emotion awareness and build emotion vocabulary literacy, and their own personal toolkits of emotion regulation strategies. Check-Ins are not intended as a diagnostic tool or data for analysis.

Education organizations seeking deep SEL practices for their communities are encouraged to augment Edsby Check-Ins with SEL programs specifically designed for schools. A good place to start is the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL.

In Edsby, only a student’s teacher has access their check-in data. Research has shown that this information must held closely.

“Learning involves risk and vulnerability, and much of what inspires children to invest the effort required in learning happens in the interpersonal space between student and teacher. Thus, the relationships of trust between teachers and students are at the heart of the learning enterprise of schools. When students trust their teachers, a climate of safety and warmth prevails which facilitates learning. Conversely, when distrust prevails, students are motivated to minimize their vulnerability by adopting self-protective stances. The result is disengagement from the educational process. Safety comes at the expense of student investment in the learning process.”

-Tschannen-Moran, M. (2014). The interconnectivity of trust in schools. D. Van Maele & P.B. Forsyth (Eds.), Trust and school life (pp. 57-81). Springer Netherlands

Red represents high intensity emotions that are unpleasant, like angry. Blue is low activation/intensity and unpleasant, like sad. Yellow is high intensity/activation and pleasant, like excitement. Green is low intensity/activation and pleasant, like calm.

Edsby Social Emotional Check-In categories of emotions color codes
Based on the work of Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161-1178. And Ahn, J., Gobron, S., Silvestre, Q., & Thalmann, D. (2010, September 13-15). Asymmetrical facial expressions based on an advanced interpretation of two-dimensional Russell’s emotional model [Paper presentation]. Proceedings of ENGAGE 2010, Zermatt, Switzerland.

When using Edsby’s Check-Ins, teachers are empowered and encouraged to follow their school’s established protocols for disclosure and follow-up if student mental health concerns are identified.

Teachers have always been among the first adults to notice students’ mental well-being and are a critical human link in supporting students’ mental health and pathways to care.

Yes. The regulation strategy content presented was developed in partnership with subject matter experts in social emotional learning and is informed by decades of SEL and emotion research. The strategies and the curriculum and training content from MindUP was developed to be culturally responsive and support diversity, equity and inclusion for the K-12 educators, administrators and families the program serves worldwide.

Edsby partnered with MindUP | The Goldie Hawn Foundation to help guide the development of its Edsby Social Emotional Check-In feature as well as provide social and emotional learning (SEL) resources and training opportunities to educators.

The Goldie Hawn Foundation is a not-for-profit organization founded to help children develop the knowledge and tools they need to strive in school and life. The evidence-based MindUP program was developed by a team of experts grounded upon on four scientific pillars: neuroscience, mindful awareness, social and emotional learning (SEL), and positive psychology. MindUP is a simple-to-administer program that has been accredited by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (casel.org) as a SELect Program.

Together, Edsby and MindUP are working to provide tools and resources for teachers to support their students’ well-being and academic success.

Ready to learn more about how Edsby could help you?