Schoolbox Reviews

"Whole-School Learning and Engagement Platform"

Comments: I was the project lead required to recommend either a new virtual learning platform, or extensive upgrade costs to the previous product. After contacting and visiting numerous schools in Queensland, I was convinced of the value Schoolbox offered. Almost two years later, teachers and students are embracing Schoolbox and looking forward to what lays ahead, particularly in whole-school communications.

Pros: There are three standout features of Schoolbox:
1. It is an all-in-one solution for teaching and learning, staff intranet and school communications
2. It is an Australian product, built by Australian educators for the Australian school market
3. The Schoolbox community is highly skilled and generous with their knowledge

Cons: Queensland curriculum compliancy remains an issue

"Schoolbox LMS"

Comments: This company actively cultivates a very personalised relationship with the company which has enabled them to continually evolve as the needs of their customers grow and change. This high level of responsiveness continually makes a good platform better.

Pros: The platform brings together many systems that we previously maintained separately. For example, calendar, news, communication, teaching resources, gradebook, assessment calendar and collaborative tools are now in one place. This has significantly streamlined workflow for everyone but is also a lot more intuitive and has allowed us to create stronger systems. For example, online submission of due work means that all work can be submitted electronically on the one day, is automatically checked for plagiarism, feedback can be delivered and fed back immediately and marks entered automatically into the gradebook. There is also much greater oversight on an individuals total workload and the ability to more effectively manage this. The platform has significantly changed some core workplace systems and in some cases has positively impacted on the culture of "how things are done". It's a "one stop shop" for school communication, collaboration, grading, resources, assessment and feedback.

Cons: There are still some areas of the gradebook which we would like tweaked for the platform to work ideally for us. In an LMS with such a wide scope, there will always be some features which are not 100% tailored to an individual school's needs. Over a 6 year relationship, we have found the company to be wonderfully responsive and adaptive to the needs of the users and are confident that this area will soon be addressed by the software engineers.

"Schoolbox: A modern solution to managing complexity in schools"

Comments: Success in the introduction of an LMS is dependent upon the quality of the product and the quality of leadership and implementation. The product has to be good but I suggest you prioritise leadership and implementation. You will have a better experience and outcome with a good product and excellent implementation than you will with an excellent product (however that might be judged) and poor implementation. I think Schoolbox is a very good product and we are doing our best to achieve an excellent implementation - it is not a small undertaking.

Pros: The Schoolbox community is excellent. The company has established a culture and framework that is very effective in supporting learning through collaboration. We have only just started out with Schoolbox but already I have found the regional user forums and annual national conferences to be excellent opportunities to learn from company representatives and from the experience of colleagues in other schools. The software itself has enormous functionality, spanning a wide range of school operations. The design reflects a deep understanding of how schools operate and it functions very reliably. Schoolbox is a sophisticated yet relatively simple tool to mange complexity in schools.

Cons: The greatest challenge with this software in our first year has been the training aspect around the 'course builder' component. In particular, teacher understanding of the relationship between 'course builder', 'course outline' and importing classes and course outlines. Related to this is the process of submitting assessment with course builder. That concept and process lacks a bit of 'stickability' for busy teachers so it is important to support teachers through training. Once teachers have a grasp of this aspect of Schoolbox, there is no stopping them.

"Schoolbox Review"

Comments: Schoolbox is now a critical platform solution for our business and educational needs. Without it we would not be able to operate efficiently. This has been a system that has grown and developed in its sophistication with us and our journey into the digital learning space.

Pros: Our Schoolbox instance is fast, reliable and readily available. Our School has been able to embed Schoolbox as our Learning Management System, Community Portal, Continuous feedback and is now our main communication platform. The support of the software (both technical and professional learning) is timely with high resolution success. The team is knowledgeable, friendly and responsive.

Cons: We have had extensive requests by our school community to allow for printable reporting functions - specially in the Grades and Feedback modules. Feature requests on the core components can be time consuming as the process involves a voting system by other Schoolbox customers for buy in. Being a long term customer and user of the system we find ourselves more advanced than other School's who may not be ready for other feature request changes.

"Forward thinking"

Comments: As mentioned above, the customer support is excellent. A registered user can call the support team and be onto a human working on a solution with almost no waiting on hold. The owners and management are approachable and willing to discuss changes even if their original opinions differ with the customers. They have built solid partnerships with other service providers and are always looking for additional partners.

Pros: - customer service is excellent. They are always able or willing to work to resolve an issue
- their road map is inspiring and focuses on the educational benefit of using an LMS
- willing to customise the base product for a fee
- not afraid to share data location in the schema

Cons: - supporting custom work. After paying for custom work to the base product, any future releases on the base product may impact the custom work. This incurs an additional cost on the customer to adjust the custom work to meet the changes. Please note Schoolbox is very clear about this before agreeing to any custom work.

"Schoolbox Review"

Comments: Schoolbox support is outstanding, and the team are always open to suggestions, improvements and the needs of clients.

Pros: Schoolbox is a comprehensive system that allows us to interact with all members of the College community, in all aspects of College life. Curriculum and co-curricular information is easily shared with Students and Parents, as well as having the added benefit of providing ongoing assessment feedback and results.

Cons: Understandably, Schoolbox has been designed to cover the broadest spectrum of needs for its users. This has meant that have been aspects that have not been suited to the needs of our College. So the aspect we have liked the least, is in having to find workarounds for some aspects.

"We've been a client now for 8 years & Schoolbox was the game changer for us."

Pros: We've now had a long working relationship with Schoolbox & we love its flexibility & the teams responsiveness. At the 5 Yr mark we had 100% take up by staff, so it's now just very much part of our culture & is a basic expectation of all teaching staff.

Cons: The only pain point is our specific customisations that often break with updates, so avoid customisation when you can.

"Always evolving and well supported. Overall this product functions well."

Pros: Notifications, News, SSO.
Communication has improved.
Provides us with a central place to launch off to other packages.

Cons: Security / Permission settings, Grade groups.
In general this product has more hits than misses.
Worth looking at.

"Excellent support"

Pros: Easy to use and excellent customer support

Cons: I find that the reporting or exporting from schoolbox is lacking.

"feedback"

Pros: different learning tools available to cater for different teaching styles and student needs

Cons: Unable to import results from an excel spreadsheet
Need to be able to produce a report for parents

"New to Schoolbox"

Comments: Our teachers are extremely happy with the interface for marking the roll and accessing student contact details. We still have many parts of Schoolbox to explore and implement.

Pros: The user interface especially when utilising our database.

Cons: The lack of support when our plan changed and we didn't receive training for the new verision. Also the issues with email and HTML code to access specific areas of our database.

"Australia's best LMS"

Comments: While recent circumstances surrounding moving classes 'online' have been challenging, our school's situation has been helped significantly by the use of Schoolbox; we have had so much positive staff engagement with Schoolbox and staff have really apprecaited what the platform can do to help them to be better teachers. This is a comprehensive and responsive LMS product. Please pass on our thanks to [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] and the team!

Pros: Schoolbox provides schools with the communication, classroom management and community building capabilities they need to flourish in the Australian educational context. It is responsive and highly adaptable and is built upon a deep understanding of what Australian schools need.

Cons: The App just needs to scale a little better for iOS devices

"SchoolBox Review"

Comments: SchoolBox has become our Learning Management System, our staff Intranet as well as our communications portal to our parents and other community stakeholders.

Pros: The ease at which the software can be configured, customised and used. The drag and drop style of adding components is something end-users are able to do themselves. It is an off the shelf prodcut purchased that was able to replace a number of bespoke, complicated solutions previously used. We had rapid on-boarding of staff due to it's ease of use.

Cons: There is nothing specific we dislike about the software, they all have there quirks and sometimes the way things are done don't always suit how users want it to work.

"Out of the box School wide Learning Management System - Easy to use and engaging for all clients"

Comments: Overall I have been happy with the product. It has achieved most of the goals we set as a project team for our LMS we went were searching to upgrade. There are some problems with it but there are with all systems. We rolled out to our whole community (approximately 1400 students + 200 staff + parents) at once and have experienced some hiccups and concerns but overall the system and the support team at SchoolBox made the process relatively easy.

Pros: The ease of use for storing information that is shared with multiple students across multiple platforms. The customisation of the product allows us to use only the features that we want and to trial those features that are new to the LMS during different releases. The best thing about SchoolBox is the network of users who regularly problem solve and develop solutions in a collaborative way.

Cons: There is considerable time being spent trying to ensure the product talks to our school wide administration system. Having said that we knew this would be an ongoing problem on both vendors sides and were prepared for the delays that are occurring.

"Schoolbox - the LMS for Citipointe"

Comments: We love that Schoolbox listens to its clients and strives to implement those features schools are chasing.
An agile company that is adept at setting and communicating its priorities to clients, whilst staying true to its core business.
A reasonably smooth implementation and roll out over the past couple of years, and looking forward to working with Schoolbox well into the future!

Pros: We like the ease of use for students, staff and parents.
Customisation of the dashboard for various audiences.
Relative ease of management for staff and administrators.
Powerful communications tool for community.
Allows students access to curriculum and extra-curricula information anywhere, anytime.
Allows the College to provide relevant messaging to parents.

Cons: Permissions structure does not always allow full administrative control. eg. sometimes easy for staff to accidentally delete an item which requires Schoolbox to restore.

"Schoolbox Review - The Scots College"

Comments: Very good. I recommend Schoolbox all the time (they should pay me for it...)

Pros: In a nutshell it covers two birds with one stone for Scots. It's our LMS (Learning Management System) and our Intranet/Portal for communications to all campuses (8) and users. Most other educational software packages are either/or whereas Schoolbox is both and both core areas are great for Scots (well developed).
That's it.

Cons: Not much I can put here. I like it. They could focus on completing some of their modules a little better but most of them are great. It gets better and better with every update.

"Makes my life as a Teacher so much easier"

Comments: It is an extension of my teachers arm so my experience has always been positive

Pros: A very intuitive LMS that requires minimal training at all levels of ability. To me it is a one stop shop for all teaching and learning matters and eliminates the use of other software's.

Cons: Unable to copy and paste homepages in the backend.

"A useful integrated virtual learning environment"

Comments: Schoolbox has been a positive rollout at our school. Three years in and all teachers and students are using it daily for class and assessment work. A lot more collaboration happens between teachers and with teachers and students. Support has been very strong and the Schoolbox Meetups for customers have been useful and well-planned. We are about to add parents in as users and are looking forward to using even more of the softwares, capabilities.

Pros: Smooth Live Integration with our Student Information System (Synergetic)
Customisable - we branded and named it using our colours, etc.
Support is very good
Embedding video and google slides particularly useful.
All required pedagogy tools are there.
Easy to make visually interesting

Cons: The Course management is difficult for an average user to understand so really requires top-down control.

"The software every school must have"

Comments: It solves our communication and teaching and learning needs right across our College from K through to 12.

Pros: Schoolbox provides end to end communication with the entire school community. It provides a place for teachers to distribute learning resources of all types to students. The product is constantly evolving and improving to what is a stable offering. It is easy to use and the support and developer teams listen to customer feedback and aim to work on further improvements and innovation.

Cons: There is not a lot I like least about Schoolbox.

"Tech Ready 4 Learning"

Comments: Communication & access to information are the two major problems we are solving.

Pros: Easy to share a multitude of digital resources with students & teachers
Ease of finding student & teacher timetables.
Ease of communication with students & parents.

Cons: There is a process to adding tasks on class pages.
It takes time before teachers understand the difference between the course pages & class pages.
Only one role per user. In some cases, this can be difficult to define.

"Transformational software for schools"

Comments: The developers respond to client and industry demand when building new features, they don't always just cave into the squeaky wheel but help them understand why it might be better to go in a different direction. They are always open to feedback both good and bad and have a great support desk.

Pros: Love that it is mobile responsive, clear communications to parents, students and staff. Powerful grader, markbook and reporting platform. DB that can be read from for analytics.

Cons: User provisioning can be a little bit of an unknown as to why certain things happen or don't but this is being addressed by the developers.

"Learning Matters"

Pros: SchoolBox provides our inclusive faith learning community a dynamic platform to empower young people in all aspects of them taking ownership of their learning, self-efficacy and overall wellness. It provides a user friendly structure to engage staff and our families as we, together, support the growth and achievement of each young man in our care.

Cons: My only challenge is that I don't have enough time in the day to fully unlock the potential of SchoolBox!

"Great Product"

Comments: It's a great product, but requires a concerted effort to implement, perhaps more than anticipated. School leaders need to own and understand the product for an effective rollout. A direction, strategy, policies etc need to be created, adopted and communicated well for Schoolbox to have an impact. You cannot just buy it, install it and hope people will use it.

Pros: Ease of use for end-users. Look and feel of the site.

Cons: Back end can be difficult and integration is not as it was explained.

"Review of Schoolbox"

Comments: Overall it has been a very positive experience working with Schoolbox and they do try to assist us. Their communication regarding changes is excellent and their annual user groups meetups both nationally and state ones are brilliant.

Pros: Information available about releases and changes and training material is fantastic.
Easy to use - most features are intuitive
Most service desk staff understand my needs
Meets many of my schools requirements

Cons: I feel the company doesn't listen sometimes to my schools needs.
Some parts are not intuitive and when asking for a change, the software owners have their way of thinking rather than listening to the customer.

"Schoolbox Review"

Comments: The benefits have been that its been a simple system for staff to use and learn and its had great impact on keeping staff accountable and providing parents with better visibility on learning.

Pros: This software provides an easy day to day management tool for staff to have a digital home for all their class content, submit and view grades and manage the schoolwide day to day communications between the school and parents and students. The data which can be extracted from the system is hugely valuable in informing teaching practice and student performance.

Cons: This software is always being improved.