Jenzabar now offers SONIS, a student information system (SIS) oriented around the needs of smaller higher education institutions. Jenzabar supports the former SONISWEB product since its acquisition of original developer RJM Systems in 2015.
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Skyward Student Management System
Score 7.7 out of 10
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Skyward, headquartered in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, offers the Skyward Student Management System, a k-12 student information system which provides classroom tools (e.g. gradebook, attendance tracking, etc), Family Engagement tools with portal, as well as admin and student services task management.
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Pricing
Jenzabar SONIS
Skyward Student Management System
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Jenzabar SONIS
Skyward Student Management System
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Jenzabar SONIS
Skyward Student Management System
Features
Jenzabar SONIS
Skyward Student Management System
Student and Faculty Administration
Comparison of Student and Faculty Administration features of Product A and Product B
Jenzabar SONIS
9.6
Ratings
15% above category average
Skyward Student Management System
6.9
Ratings
18% below category average
Integrations with 3rd-Party Education Technology
9.00 Ratings
5.90 Ratings
Online Registration Management
10.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
District Communications, such as messaging and alerting
My main reason for not giving SONIS a 10 is the customer service. Over the years as the company has gotten larger the customer service has gotten slower. Depending on the issue I have had to wait for some unreasonable amounts of time for resolution. Uptime is fantastic, so please expect your servers to be well taken care of and things to run smoothly (if you go with Jenzabar for hosting). But sometimes things go wrong and a report will not function as you expect it to, and sometimes those fixes take a while to happen. For the most part, when things are working, they work very very well and we are happy little staffers.
Skyward SMS is well suited as a Student Management System for anyone who wants to drive their organization based on data. The capabilities of using the fields available as well as adding our own custom forms make data collection extremely easy. Reporting abilities take that data and allow us to make sense of what has been collected
Jenzabar SONIS provides tools for working with individuals from their first request for information through submitting an application, being accepted for admission, enrolling in courses, taking and completing courses, and graduating from the school. The available tools not only provide a way to manage the data, but also for ongoing communication between the school and the prospect/student/graduate.
Jenzabar SONIS allows a school the flexibility of enrolling students in individual courses, like you might have in adult education departments, or in programs and courses like you would find for students working on a degree. This flexibility made Jenzabar SONIS a valuable tool for us because we had not only certificate-seeking students but also a large Community Education Department and could use the same software for both.
Jenzabar SONIS has the tools to record attendance and grades directly into a gradebook or to import final grades. This allowed us to continue to use our LMS for those teachers who wanted the resources available in that system while letting teachers who just needed a place to store grades to enter them directly into SONIS.
The ability to attach pdfs to courses and individual records allowed us to scan many of our cumulative files from our archive and attach them to the alumni records in Jenzabar SONIS. This gave us more accessible, secure storage for our historical records and made it much easier to produce transcripts for alumni.
Skyward does well with managing the students' information. It was easy to find a student's schedule, grades, behavior record, or family information because it was all separated out.
Another strength is the system’s way of requesting time off. All of the steps are laid out in a organized manner, and you can check the status of the request with one click.
Skyward also pairs well with other applications. Whenever I need a substitute for a class, Skyward links me to Aesop (the absence software) and allows me to put in the request. When I’m done, Skyward updates automatically with that information.
We changed databases in 2011 because the company we were with was going to quit supporting our software. We evaluated a number of different SISs available at the time and felt Jenzabar SONIS provided the best tools for our school. Most of the others were either geared more for adult education, individual course offerings or for schools that primarily had degree-seeking students. We needed something that could address both needs.We felt Jenzabar SONIS did that best of the ones we reviewed.
Skyward is used differently at our school than GoGuardian. GoGuardian is used to monitor student use of technology during school hours, and Skyward is used to track student data such as attendance, uniform, tardy arrivals, grades, and behavior. Overall, Skyward's interface is more user-friendly than GoGuardian. GoGuardian requires even more clicking around to find what you are looking for
I believe that we have had a great Return on our Investment as we have been using this software at a district-wide level for several years now and it keeps being an effective management software system for our students and families.
