Alma SIS Reviews

Pros

What I liked the most about this Software is that it helps teachers to stay organized in their daily plannings, but also in the evaluation process.

This was my first year as a teacher, and I loved using ALMA because I got the chance to put all the information that I needed in that Software. Just by clicking on ALMA I could take attendance, find information about my students, update my plannings, follow the CCSS Standards and upload the grades.

Cons

At the beginning of the school year, it was a little complicated for me to understand how ALMA worked. I had to ask many times to the Principal of my school about how to upload my daily plannings and align the assessments to the Standards. However, after a few weeks of practicing, it became easier for me.

Pros

Alma is easier than our former software and allows us to use our Standards Based Grading which is our priority. Parents were able to quickly learn how to use the system and the attendance feature is great. Students were also able to learn the system and although it doesn't have a comprehensive calendar with their schedules and our school activities, they were able to use the daily tab to track their classes.

Cons

The calendar is static and unable to be exported to phones/other calendars so we had to create an app for that. The reports are not as in-depth as needed and we aren't able to save our filters/criteria that we use often. They are still working on SBG reporting so many items we aren't able to track as we typically do through reports. The report card set up is limited for what we need in our report cards; we had to use every work-around to get a report card as we needed, but they do work now.

Alternatives Considered

PraxiSchool and Schoology

Reasons for Choosing Alma SIS

K-12 was trying to start Standards Based Grading but didn't meet our deadline.

Switched From

Blackbaud K-12 Solutions

Reasons for Switching to Alma SIS

It has what we needed for Standard Based Grading both in assignments and report cards for tracking.

Pros

Alma SIS is understandable to use and all the school management needs are included in it.

Cons

But Alma SIS doesn't match our region. Especially in the payment section. Furthermore, the time difference makes slower our connection.

Pros

I like that I can look up any student in our school and see that student's schedule and current information.

Cons

1. Our students (Seniors especially) cannot get their current transcripts. This is troubling for many reasons. Perhaps the most important being their choices for scholarships and higher education will be affected by this. Students cannot apply for financial assistance through scholarships without current transcripts. I have personally spoken with at least three students who have missed out on scholarship opportunities, simply because they cannot access current transcripts.
2. Can't see overall student GPA
3. Can't see student class rank
4. Student Mobile usage is very confusing. Can't see grades the way they should.
5. Ease of access is horrible
6. No mobile app, and mobile website is very difficult to read
7. Not organized well
8. When emailing "all students" I cannot exclude certain classes; I can't email multiple classes at once without including EVERYONE
9. For attendance, it is very confusing. If a student is marked present first class, they are marked present for the entire day. This was clearly set up for use in an Elementary School. High School is different. We need to be able to see where our students are throughout the day.
10. Inputting grades takes many more steps than our previous system. There is no way to toggle between students with the keyboard.
11. There should be a way to block certain people from seeing certain information. At the beginning of the school year, student Social Security Numbers were viewable by any teacher or staff in our building.

Pros

I like that this service is very user friendly, and easy to find the answers to questions that I have.

Cons

I think maybe a feature could be added where teachers could add notes and comments, not just administrators.

Pros

The software enables us to have all the data related to students, teachers, curriculum and assessment in one place. There are many things that are just "one click" tasks and things don't have to be re-done at the beginning of each school year. They can just be copied, transferred, modified... I also like that there is always a solution to everything, even if an option does not exist in the system, the support team helps find ways to make sure we get what we need.

Cons

There are some things that we would like to have. For example: the option to show attendance on the report card per class (as opposed to per day), or the option to include a digital signature on the cover. These are some tiny things that we have found ways to resolve, but we have communicated them with the support team and we feel confident that they take our feedback into consideration.

Pros

It does not require extensive training to learn how to use; the parent portal gives parents all the info they need at their fingertips; it has centralized all of our student info and made it accessible to all staff who need it; the report card design process is great--you can really customize it to suit your needs; they are constantly releasing updated and improved features based on customer feedback and requests; customer support is always available and very friendly/responsive.

Cons

The reporting functions are limited--it is frustrating at times not being able to design customized reports or to tweak the built-in reports for your exact needs; teachers have some complaints about gradebook's functionality (although many aspects of the gradebook are much better than our former system--it's tough to find everything you need in one program--there are always going to be tradeoffs); scheduling was a bit of a nightmare (on the other hand, our school's programming is very non-standard and often breaks software); there is no app yet--or even a mobile-friendly view--which is really needed for our population, where a large % of parents use their phones exclusively for internet access.

Pros

Calculating marks, organizing curiculum, making notes and comments about the student's marks are all bundled up into one interface. Compiles comments and report card creation onto one PDF that is simple to use.

Cons

Inputting assignments and assigning them manually is tedious. The "Save" button and "Submit for Review" button are both the same size despite the "Save" button being the more important one during report cards submissions.

Pros

The use of use and finding what is needed in a quick and timely fashion.

Cons

The inability to pre label assessments in categories.

Pros

The option to send mass emails and messages to parents and students.

Cons

Not having incorporation with Ed Plan, and options for specific fields.

Pros

The main selling point from Alma was the ease of use. Out of all of the systems I've demoed and tried, it was easily the easiest to log in, poke around, and figure out how to do what I needed to do with minimal training.

The second selling point is their customer service. Absolutely top notch. Their people are friendly, very responsive, and (most importantly) humans. I enjoy talking to them! I can usually get a response from a rep within minutes and even our teachers are welcome to message them with questions.

The third selling point is that they are new system with a considerably active development cycle. We knew, going into it, that they wouldn't be as fully fleshed out as competitors like PowerSchool. That also means that it's easier for newer and fresher ideas to be implemented. It's not built on some old archaic database. Many of the features they do have that I use regularly such as the Report Card Builder and the Spreadsheet Data Editor/Report builder are very well done. We regularly get emails about new features being added and they listen to their customers when new features are requested. They've given us a lot of new toys since we first signed on with them.

The final selling point is narwhals.

Cons

Probably the biggest issue that I face regularly is that their district level stuff isn't as fleshed out as I would like it to be. Many of the cool features that are available at each of the schools I manage can't be done in the district portion, aggregating all data and whatnot. I've been told they are working on that stuff though!

Alternatives Considered

PowerSchool

Reasons for Choosing Alma SIS

TylerSIS was horrible.

Reasons for Switching to Alma SIS

PowerSchool had just released a new HTML5 interface. When asking for a sandbox demo, they couldn't even be bothered to show off their shiny new product. They gave us an old dinosaur of a sandbox that was not appealing at all. Alma whipped us up a sandbox no problem. Some of the fake names of students, teachers, and were hilarious references as well! Also, during the review process, we were using a Powerschool product known as Haiku. One day it went down. The page just wasn't loading. We emailed Powerschool for information and, just as a test, emailed Alma as well. Alma got back to us within 15 minutes. Powerschool got back to us about 2-3 days later. There were a number of other little things like that that swayed our decision.

Pros

This is a pretty good product, not perfect, but good.
The most useful part here is the link to google classroom for grading. This helps me be able to give feedback in one place and have it connected to my students and their parents.

The parts that would be nicer for our specific use would be if Alma would be able to be linked to Atlas, Inc. this is what our school uses for different organizational goals.

Cons

There have been a few glitches in the system that our administration has run into. First dealing with the report cards for 6th grade did not work out with the Semester 1 Reports. So we had to give the parents the Nine weeks report cards for our school.

The one part that is disappointing is the link does not work with standards based grading. This problem does not stem from Alama, but is from Google not doing standards based grades.

Other than that it has worked much better than the Power School System we had in place before.

Pros

I LOVE the customer service, everyone is very personable and quick to respond. My questions are answered completely and I am always directed to where I can find answers to my questions. The program is very easy to use and, typically, I can figure out most issues I am having using the resource pages.

Cons

It might be lack of knowledge on our end, but the teachers are not happy with the standardized grading in Alma. I would also like to be able to allow more detailed access to only certain teachers with specified things.

Pros

Its ease of use is perfect, Easily adaptable to our school environment.

Cons

there are a few minor features that are missing

Alternatives Considered

Blackboard Collaborate

Reasons for Choosing Alma SIS

Rediker was too clunky, too expensive, and way more than we needed.

Switched From

Administrator's Plus

Reasons for Switching to Alma SIS

Its integration with Schoology.

Pros

There are concessions made to narrative evaluation, which is great for an alternative school. Each block, the system gets cleaner and easier to handle as we write our evaluations for the kids, and, since our output is so much more complex than a single letter grade, it’s really important that the cognitive overhead for each evaluation be as small as possible. I’m really gratified that Alma continually improves this aspect.

Cons

Touchscreen integration is clunky but getting less so. It’s often hard to see what I’m doing, as column headers disappear as I scroll. There are a bunch of interface elements like this that make interactions awkward or repetitive, which induces frustration and boredom, which leads to errors.

It feels like evaluations are 90° off. I want to be able to evaluate a student, but it’s easiest to evaluate not only one class at a time, but one skill for the whole class at a time. It discourages thinking holistically about individual students and encourages comparing them in each skill. I think this makes it harder to do evaluations and makes them less accurate.

Daily evaluation notes go nowhere. We take attendance each day, which is dutifully reported, but any qualitative expression we have is thrown away. This does a great disservice to students because it means that, in the course of a day, it’s harder to make qualitative assessments of a student, leaving us only with their attendance data — a quantification that’s easy on a database designer but is hostile to learning.

Pros

It's the only SIS that looks like it was designed in the past decade. The site itself is easy to use. The basics (scheduling, attendance, calendar, student bios, medical) are all well done, user-friendly, and look great. Gradebook is excellent. Frontline support is helpful.

Cons

Reporting is a nightmare. Reports come in random formats. The descriptions are confusing. The filtering is confusing or doesn't work right. The screen where you choose reports is just a long confusing list. There's no preview of what the report is or looks like.

Some information that you'd expect to be readily available (like a student's current grades) require running one of those confusing reports to find. The district portal is useless. New features that have been added (fees, report builder) feel unfinished and lack basic functionality that one would expect. While the front-line support is good, anything that has to go beyond them gets lost in a black hole when sent to "engineering".

There are some quirks to the program that just make no sense. Little things here and there.

Pros

Our school was first drawn to Alma because it combined a good software to meet student, parent, and teacher needs with great value. Customer service is fantastic. If any of us ask an online question, help is quick.

Cons

Alma takes a long time to keep up with the times. For example, we have used it several years, but they just added the ability to enter a score on one student's grade book for a given assignment, and then hit enter, and then an automatic opening to the next student's grade to enter. In effect, it now performs well with a number key pad. Entry was singularly entered one a time which was so slow. In addition, there should be a quicker way to approve report cards. Finally, because we want students to monitory their grades, it would be helpful for them to have their own password access for limited viewing, keeping the parent password private for fuller access.

Pros

The best thing abour Alma is its ease of use. In addition, it has one of the most professional and responsive customer support departments I have ever encountered in any product or industry.

Cons

It does not yet have all of the functionality that we would like, particularly in the area of recording curriculum, but since we adopted it three years ago they have regulerly added new features and improved the functionality of what was already there. I really do believe that in short order they will address curriculum within the program, and at that point every major use we have for an SIS would be covered.

Pros

I have found little positive to say about the functioning of the software. It does not fit the size of our organization and the design structure is too primitive. There are too many steps involved for transactions.

Cons

*the que*lack of confidentiality*process of accessing information, having to scroll through entire population to select students for reports*scheduling functionality is primitive* data reliability and validity for student grades and transcripts* student and parent use has diminished* report card processing is cumbersome* student display of schedule; no full year* student print out of schedule and on and on

Pros

There's too much to list everything!!!
I like the class function, the internal staff note function, the file cabinet, the graduation function and the reporting function, though I would tweak them all a bit.

Cons

I don't know how to ask for changes. That isn't really obvious to me at all. Everything below I'd probably be able to ask for, but don't know how.
With the class function, I would like to print class lists without the pictures. I also LIKE printing lists with pictures, but a lot of time I just want the data.
Also, I would love the print the class schedule as it is on the page, but it reverts to another version that I do not like at all.
With the Internal Staff Note function, I would like to be able to hide it on the overview page. That's the page that has grades and I like to show them to students, but NOT the internal staff notes.

Pros

I love that as a teacher I can customize my grade book easily and have different types of assignments weighted differently (and it does all of the math for me!). I also am so happy about the fact that I can publish the grades to where students or parents can see the grades instantly. It is also very easy to email home mid-term grades to all students/parents in one email :) .

Cons

Some of the functionalities that Alma offers are great functions, but they are not always user friendly. For example, there are A LOT of steps to go through to create a report card/progress report. I had a very difficult time figuring out how to create a progress report for a student who took one elective class first term (sewing) and a different elective class second term (art), and other students were vice-versa without it causing issues on the report card. I would also like to have the ability for students/parents to see a percentage grade for a class as opposed to just a letter grade. It makes a difference when you see a 79% vs 70%. I would also like to be able to truly design my own report card. I can make what I want fit onto a single page, but with the options available on Alma, it is not as easy to adjust certain areas to make everything fit.

Pros

I like that Alma has customized the system to a lot of our needs since we first adopted it. It's very easy to use!

Cons

I would like for the Alma gradebook to work more seamlessly with our LMS, Schoology.

Pros

Alma is a great software package. The gradebook feature is easy to use on the administrator end. If features need adjustment, you can contact the company and they LISTEN!

Cons

There's nothing to not like. Teachers and staff are still learning to use the features, and that's typically the most difficult thing - getting folks to change practices based on old software.

Pros

Alma is easy to set up and use, which is essential in a school environment. The different features are intuitive and my staff needed minimal training and support before fully utilizing the product.

Cons

I do wish some things could be customized further. For example, in Myanmar students do not have first and last names, so if we could change to a single naming field that would be really helpful. Similarly, I would appreciate the ability to customize other demographic data such as race, ethnicity, and languages.