Lenovo offers LanSchool, a classroom management platform supporting collaboration, monitoring student activity, chat, teacher broadcasting / screen-sharing, and other features.
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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.
I have recommended it across campus and would not hesitate to do so again. It has been great in our lab environments and would like to continue using it for years to come. In the future as we move away from physical labs I will be investigating to purchase for BYOD devices, however I know that I will face pushback from students on this. However we must weigh privacy & security vs. using BYOD devices and integrity on exams.
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.
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.
In terms of competition, there is no real competition that we have used at the school or find on the market. We use tools such as REMIND, MOODLE, and KAHOOT, but none of them would be a replacement for LanSchool. On the contrary, all of those tools would support what we do with LanSchool because it gets students in the comfort level of using different technology tools to communicate and be successful. Apple has a Remote Desktop tool, similar to LanSchool in most ways. The key difference between Apple's Remote Desktop and LanSchool is that Lenovo's LanSchool has a student app and a stronger teacher platform to use on non-Mac devices. Our school focuses on LanSchool because using it on a PC and on a MAC, it is the same interface with the same fluidity. Teaching students on MACs to use Remote Desktop and on PC's or Chromebooks to use LanSchool would be a misuse of resources and confusing for educators and students. The best system for engagement and student use would be via LanSchool on all operating systems.
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.
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!
