Once you get the hang of navigating your way through Sycamore, it can be a useful tool. When I'm grading, it tells me if a student was absent on the day of the assignment and that was really helpful.
Navigation throughout the website is not intuitive. It took me a while to learn how to use the system and I consider myself pretty good with technology. Links bring you to pages that you wouldn't expect, and you have to go through multiple buttons just to take attendance (at least that's how our school's Sycamore was set up).
Sycamore is a good program for the low cost that you get it for. If you are willing/able to spend a little bit more, though, there are other programs that can do more (like chart and graph grades, etc.).
As a school, we used Sycamore to grade and send out report cards in an organized way. We also used it to take attendance.It was helpful for accomplishing those tasks.
This is the first management system I have actually liked because it’s website is user friendly. Teachers can use batch email to communicate with parents, while parents can check grades etc all on one site.
They have developed an app but it is obvious it is still in the beginning stages. Parents cannot see Homework or grades correctly as opposed to being on website. The app also doesn’t have all the menu options listed as the website does so there’s certain things you can’t do on app.
It is great to use and it’s even greater to know they are still revamping it and making it better. It’s weaknesses right now lie in the app use, but they have already implemented many changes so I’m sure in time it’ll be full functioning:)
Communication with parents and availability of grades for parents to see is crucial in education. Parents are able to be more involved in their student's academic life.
Sycamore Education provides a great way to manage information for small to medium size schools. It allows for organization of documents, tracking of attendance, management of schedules, and posting of grades.
Though highly useful as a one-stop website for school management, the interface is not terribly intuitive and the initial set-up takes a fair amount of time.
If your school is relatively small (under 500 students), I believe Sycamore Education is a reasonably priced and usable solution. There may be some difficulty with the initial set-up, but once all data is entered and parameters are set, Sycamore is effective at managing school information.
Instead of using multiple school information systems, Sycamore Education puts most of the tools necessary for school management in one place. As a new school, we evaluated several options to wrangle our data. Many options proved prohibitively expensive and included features that we had no use for. Sycamore hit the right spot for both price and functionality.
I like that I can use sycamore from the app or from ,y classroom computer. I like that so don’t have to do any special submit of semester grades. I like that you can add up to 5 assignments at a time.
I don’t like that you have to save out of pages quite often, auto save would help. When adding assignments, I can only add calendar days for th next Week at a time. This can be worked around, but is not automatic.
Take your time to practice and you can have success with it. Takes some getting use to th functions, it overall, easier to use than RDS.
I can easilu grade and take attendance from the app.
I like that there are many different tools available for a variety of purposes. Lunch, grades, attendance, news, links, you name it and Sycamore can do it.
It definitely has a learning curve. It took me about a month before I was completely comfortable doing what i needed to do on sycamore. Sycamore is NOT a very user friendly platform.
Grading, attendance, lunch, etc.
I like the in-app messaging services. It makes communicating with co-workers easy.
It is not compatible for schools with few students. I was looking for a sms, but this did not meet my needs because I didn't meet the minimum amount of students.
This is beneficial to all schools that are currently seeking a sms.
Sycamore provides solutions for our schools needs. Parents really enjoy being able to see their student's grades, assignments, and progress. Being able to schedule for parent/teacher conferences is very beneficial.
I enjoy Sycamore's grading features, including grade configuration, grade summaries, and grade reports.
There are some ways in which Sycamore is not user friendly, specifically in the app when parents are viewing their student's classes. It is difficult for them to find their class home pages and work and such.
There are setup videos that Sycamore provides. Since this system is so multi-faceted, I would reccommend watching each video and collecting as many details about the system that you can. While trial and error can be an efective way of learning a system, learning as much as you can prior to use can be helpful, especially with how crazy the beginning of school year can be!
Sycamore allows you to keep records well within the system.
Sycamore has been very accommodating to us and sought to know where they can make changes so that their product is as functional and supportive as possible.
The program is not as intuitive as it could be. It feels like you need to do a lot of clicking to get where you want to go.
Good product for the price.
Sycamore has helped us communicate with our distant parents via the web.
I did like that it was a pretty inexpensive program. It helped us take attendance and keep grades all together.
Navigating through Sycamore is a bit difficult. Buttons bring you to pages you wouldn’t expect them to, and sometimes you have to go through multiple layers of clicking around just to find what you need (an example being finding the page that you can take attendance on).
There are other systems that do way more that only cost slightly more than Sycamore.
It has helped us record grades and take attendance all in one place.
Sycamore education has been a very useful program for teachers throughout my school. It provides useful databases for the inputting data and provides a useful grade book. The grade book was vital for teachers as it was online and could be accessed through any internet connection.
Sycamore education was much easier to start implementing than I expected. I thought transitioning to this software would have been more challenging.
Sycamore Education was really useful for teachers throughout my school. I really liked how it allows teachers to send an email to multiple parents all at once.
Making the challenging life of a teacher much easier on a daily basis. Teachers really enjoyed how it has a platform for multiple functions including classroom management, data and grade book.
It has everything I need in one software.
I don't like how there are so many options for documents/attachments/etc. I get confused of knowing what I need to upload and where.
Better communication between faculty/staff and parents; organization
I love how everything is organized specifically. Profile, grades, courses,etc.
Having to login after being idle for 5-10 minutes.
Ease. Great way to quickly get grades and assignments out
Helps give continuous feedback to parents
Does not automatically reset at the end of the quarter
Parent communication. Also helps keep track of finances