Boardingware, headquartered in Auckland, offers their student management system for boarding schools, built around managing the needs particular to boarding schools, such as student care and student tracking.
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Schoolmint Hero
Score 9.7 out of 10
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Hero is student behavior management software for K-12 schools and districts, from Schoolmint. Hero's goal is to enable consistent redirection of negative behavior, reinforcement of positive behavior and communication between educators, students, parents, and administrators across classrooms school and district-wide. Features include positive behavior tracking tools, referral and tardy management, school event management, behavior analytics data, etc.
This is hands down the best application on the market in terms of making sure parents and staff understand where students are at any given time during the day. It also has done a great job of expanding into buy-in areas for students such as having event sign-ups inside the application. Having parent accounts also does a great job of keeping lines of communication open between the parents, school, and students.
I would highly recommend this as long as you are able to get 90% or more buy-in. However, if there is not a MAJORITY buy-in I don't feel it will be successful. My colleagues and I found that classroom management was much improved in the classrooms of us who were sold on using it and used it with fidelity, adding extra intensives because of infidelity in other classrooms. It became obvious to the administration that the lack of buy-in was destroying the program outcome.
User-friendly interface. One doesn't need to really even use the tutorials if they don't want to.
Customer service - I've never gone more than 24 hrs without an issue being resolved. Usually it's much less than that.
Constant improvements and expansion. The program keeps growing without the need to change what we're doing. There are improvements that are helpful, but we're not forced to use them if they are not actually useful or needed. This is a great asset.
I gave this rating because Boardingware support is unbelievable. They are quick to reply and have a chat feature that they not only are there for most of the day but you can leave a note if they are not available and they get back to you very quickly. I thoroughly enjoyed any conversations I had with support from Boardingware.
Someone is always available. I like being able to call, chat, or email as needed. There are also a lot of tutorials and webinars provided. Hero does a good job of providing tools for onboarding new users and customers as well. It is easy to find whatever information you are looking for.
Senior Systems did not work as well and the functionality from the administrative side is not as user-friendly. I often felt like it was down and not working properly, or that I could not find where certain documents are. I believe that for a boarding school community Boardingware was much more user-friendly, and did not take as many steps in order to get the job done quickly.
We have used Class Dojo and Progress Book. Hero is great for discipline specifically. We also have e-school, but it does not allow the level of detail and follow up that Hero has. Before Hero, we had a really ineffective system for tracking student discipline, and it was hard to be consistent.
We are able to manage the weekend and weekly sign outs of boarders. We are also able to store this information ion the cloud in case it is ever needed in the future.
Parents are able to manage their sons where abouts and also have the knowledge that they know where their boys are on the weekends
Housemasters are protected if they follow procedures in case of a boarder missing a roll call and has not signed out.
Definitely worth the money. The kids are happy, they're using the program as often as they can, and they appreciate the opportunity to be rewarded for their good behavior.
We've been able to sustain a store, and that's super awesome. I know we wouldn't be able to without the help of Hero and the ways in which we keep the hype.
I think I need more help with teacher adoption. We have a lot of initiatives at our school, so we're trying to take on a little more than we can chew at this point. We're getting there though!
