Opiniones de Alma SIS

As a teacher I can say that Alma is one of the best virtual classrooms that I have tried, it is an all-in-one and something that I love is the management of evaluations and students without having to resort to any other external platform.
The function that I use the most is evaluative management since right there I can check my lists for the student report card system as well as the grade assigned to the same task and document

It is difficult to say that Alma has something bad, rather something not so good and that is first-hand integration, but once learned it is phenomenal

Alma SIS has some of the best tech support, one on one access all the time. They are always considering feedback and ways to implement when possible.

Some of the things that I request for feedback don't always get completed but they have their reasonings for that.

You can log in quickly. The people who have come in to assist with how horrific this year has been have been mostly humble and at least tried to help.

Absolutely impossible to have what we need at our hands as high school counselors. Everything is laborious or actually impossible to do. It has taken MONTHS to get even tiny bits of advances to make this usable. Transcripts, which are an essential piece for our kids, took 6 months to have functioning, and they're still inaccurate. Scheduling is months behind because the programming is inept for a school this size. It lacks confidentiality and privacy that's important for our students. Household units are not available, access to other buildings makes it impossible to know who has siblings and other people living in their home, which poses a safety issue when filing reports to CPS, report cards are still completely wrong and inaccurate. I could truly go on for an awfully long time, but I digress.

At the end of the day, I think I can vouch for every person in my building when I say that this program was rolled out in a deplorable way, changes and improvements are slow and sometimes non-existent, and it's made me reconsider even working in this corporation due to how terrible this system is. A program in its infancy has been detrimental to every single stakeholder in this corporation, and I've been disappointed since the first day of training in August.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Alma is intuitive and easy to navigate. Setup and implementation was smooth, overall, it is very user friendly and easy for teachers and families to navigate. The reporting is excellent and the report cards look professional. Accessing data is easy on a day to day basis.

There are some simple features missing, like schedule send, more editing options with school announcements which would have a bigger benefit.

It is an intuitive student management system, and their customer service can't be beat!

We would like to get more student information entered via Alma Start to migrate to Alma SIS - I think they are working on these updates though!

It's a very professional and easy to use platform

The price is high compared to the features needed for our use

Alma is so easy to build out and use. They get more and more features every year.....For example, we can now import new student information, and easily run all of our NYS reports. It's really amazing how comprehensive yet seemingly simple Alma is at each user level. I think that because it's on the newer end of student information systems, the interface is just simpler...they don't need to account for decades' worth of data that was entered in a certain way years and years ago.

The recently changed their customer support to a tiered system, making it more difficult to get answers quickly. That said, the system is simple enough that questions don't come up all that often. Also, they are building out their SFTP capacity, but I wish it could communicate directly with our lottery/enrollment system.

1) The features that where the most impactful:
-Attendance and Report Cards

2.) Is the product easy to use?
-The learning curve was a little steep in the beginning, but because of fantastic customer support, all concerns were quickly answered and solutions were given/suggested that solved the problems.

3.) Was the integration with your existing business processes easy?
-Teachers found it easy to use overall.

1.) Are there features you feel are missing or could be improved?
a.) Finer granular control over the lay-outing of the templates.
b.) Ability to add drop-down dates in some places.
c.) Manual inputting of each teacher’s class schedules for all grade levels is tedious. Alma should have a built-in feature of uploading .CSV files for creating and updating class schedules instead of using an optional 3rd party service.
d.) The sandboxed sites for testing the look and feel of creating classes and report cards are geared for US school systems and not for international school systems, and which I did not find very useful.
e.) There should be a feature during the initial set-up of the school year to allow certain weekends that can be ticked-off as part of the school year.

2.) Are there aspects of the product that are difficult to use?
-ALMA Start (for creating online school enrollment forms, online parent info access, etc.) is a little complicated to learn and implement without a sandboxed testing environment when the school year has already started.

First of all, I liked how often improvements were made throughout the year. It seemed that ALMA was always looking for ways to continue to improve the software in order to make it more user friendly. As a PE teacher, my grading system is quite different from the classroom teacher. I have 19 different classes (K-6) with about 30 students in each class. Each class would attend PE 2x each week. At first, it was very arduous to submit all the grades, one student at a time, at the end of each term. One of the improvements that occurred during this past school year, was to be able to submit an entire class's grades at the same time! That one change lightened my work load tremendously! And made it so I looked forward to doing grades instead of dreading it!

As I became more familiar with the features of the software, I became more comfortable using it, but I regret that it took me into my 2nd year using it, to become the most comfortable. Even so, the thing I liked the least about using this software was when I needed to make changes to the lesson details and maneuvering around the different tabs was a but cumbersome to have. Too many steps to have to make the changes I needed to. Hope that makes sense. Thanks!

Alma has a very clean aesthetic with intuitively easy to use. The customer service is top-notch. Even during the pandemic, the response time has been exceptional. The techs are supportive, humorous, collegial, yet professional. Really happy with this platform.

I am looking forward to their continued build-out of the transcript function of their platform. They register all suggestions with their engineers, and once they get enough "up votes" they add them to the next roll-out. Can't ask for a more egalitarian system of continuous improvement.

The software is easy to use and produces so many report options.

During Covid the response time to questions/problems has sometimes taken over a day. When a teacher or parent needs something the delay in resolution leaves the school appearing less professional.

ALMA allowed us to do standards based grading in a very efficient and seamless manner. ALMA had Florida standards uploaded for us, so it made it very easy to choose standards for grading. It was very easy to design the template that we wanted to use for our report cards. Responses to questions were almost immediate. ALMA is very intuitive to use - especially for someone like me who is technologically challenged.

Nothing stands out as a negative. I would be searching to find something that dissatisfied us.

Alma has been a great solution for our attendance, grading and communication systems needs. There is a seamless integration with Google classroom and it's very easy to communicate with a single student, their family or the whole class. Health information is readily available and I can also see a student's attendance and progress in other classes. When I have contacted ALMA for assistance, the response is almost immediate. There are emails with information about new features and how to integrate them. They have been extremely responsive to educators' needs during COVID-19 homeschooling this spring .

It would be nice to be able to change a grade transferred from Google classroom without needing to go into that assignment in Google. Automatic grade updates or syncing from Google classroom would be helpful too, as I often forget to re-sync Google assignments in ALMA.

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!

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.