Schoology vs Alma SIS: Which is a better fit?

Rita: My name is Rita. I'm a German teacher at Hampshire High School, which is a rural high school in West Virginia, and we have been using Schoology for quite some time now, and I would probably give it a close to a rating of five. In our school, we used to use it during the pandemic, also for attendance. Right now it is basically for grades. But we also post our assignments there, especially it comes in handy when you post all your assignments there for the people that are absent or that are missing school due to illness. And we also use it to basically keep track of students' progress, for progress reports and for report cards. It's probably the feature of self-grading, little quizzes, little pop-up quizzes that you can create. And I love those because you put in effort once, you can reuse them year after year and they self grade. Also, during the pandemic, what was very important, you had to sequence basically your assignments because most students would not come online. It was not required in West Virginia, we couldn't make it mandatory. So the sequencing of assignments to follow through step by step, that was very crucial and Schoology lets you do that. And that was an awesome feature that we needed during that time. Of course, it saves all your classroom materials that you have and you can reuse it then the following year. Again, you just hit back from where you stored it, you post it again and bingo, you're back in business. The customer service is something that from a teacher point of view is basically non-existent. You have frequent questions and answers section, but most of the time if you have an issue, you see that numerous teachers in front of you have been asking that. It should probably need a little bit of an overhaul at this point, especially the HTML feature or the more flexibility that you just can drag and drop your assignments rather than just clicking and send to. It's a little bit ease off usage. That would be great. They have improved some of the things, and of course it also depends on what your county or your district allows you to do and what they will allow you to see. But a little overhaul would be nice.

Tom J.: My name is Tom. I am the elementary principal at Kingsway Christian Schools, and we use Alma SIS, and I would rate it a 4 out of 5. Prior to using Alma, we were using Blackboard in our elementary school. For us, Blackboard was a bit clunky and it was difficult to navigate and didn't really make communication smooth when we're trying to communicate between school and our community. We chose Alma because it was user-friendly, it was really easy for our teachers to learn how to use it, how to communicate with families, everything's been organized really well, and their customer service has been very helpful. We decided to bring Alma in a whole year early so we could get used to the functionality, make sure we were really confident before we rolled it out across our campus. That was really seamless. We always had good communications with implementation specialists, and the rollout went really well. I would just recommend that you do your homework, you look at what's out there. For us as an elementary school, the ease of use and being able to communicate really seamlessly is really what we needed and it met our needs. It could be different depending on your school community as well.