Edsby and Classroom are similar in some things. For instance:

• Authoring and distributing course content
• Enabling Google Docs and other widely used Google systems
• Online quizzes with instant grading
• Electronic document submission with online markup & grading

The following are better in Edsby:

• Assessment and gradebook – can be much more advanced in Edsby, even standards-based
• Class resources – in Edsby, teachers can assemble much more than simple curriculum in each of their classes with an advanced knowledge base & library
• External resources – teachers, schools and districts/regions can assemble and make external resources available within Edsby, even differentiating by role

Edsby was designed to enable K-12 educators to perform all the tasks they need to every day in a single app, with a single login. It includes many things Classroom does not, such as:

• Official school attendance
• Visual evidence of learning capture, for sharing and reporting
• Teachers seeing their and students’ schedules
• Parent-teacher communication
• Parent-teacher conference scheduling
• Class seating plans
• Student portfolios
• Progress reports
• Official report card entry and publishing with office workflow
• Classroom analytics
• And more

Edsby was designed to connect the whole school community, including administrators, teachers, students, and parents —all with their own accounts, in one integrated platform.

Classroom was designed for middle- to high school learning and teaching. Edsby has invested heavily in features for early year assessment and reporting.

• Visual evidence of learning capture & sharing
• Capturing parent feedback on students’ learning stories
• Teacher curate-able portfolio of learning that follows child through their school journey

Standards-based assessment. Multi-level stranding. Mastery learning. Formative assessments. Schools, districts and regions can apply their choice of advanced assessment schemes, far beyond Classroom’s basic summative letter and number percentages, lack of symbolic schemes or any aggregation other than average.

Edsby has progress reports and can be used to generate official report cards. They can be configured to school, district or regional policies, scheduled frequencies and templates.

K-12 districts or regions pride themselves on the standards they’ve carefully developed over time. And that’s okay with Edsby. Manage your local standards, expectations, outcomes or competencies in a standards-based way, and then apply them to everything your teachers do in Edsby.

Give teachers official, pre-configured Edsby classrooms with their gradebooks and reporting system already set for them at the start of every year. Enable them to assess and report on student progress consistently across classrooms, schools and grade levels.

Edsby enables distinct parent logins connected to, but separate from, the accounts of their children. Edsby accounts give parents ways to:

• Communicate privately with educators
• Monitor grades
• See latest attendance
• View homework
• Report planned absences
• Approve field trips
• Book parent-teacher interviews
• Receive instant notifications
• And more

Edsby groups enable online parent advisory councils, PTAs or similar conversations with parents and serve as an online place where relevant resources for parents interacting with their schools can be found. Even if parents can’t all join an online meeting at the same time. Parents can interact with other parents in groups. Teachers can use groups for organizing parent volunteers for activities.

Edsby integrates closely with K-12 organizations’ student information systems (SISes) and other systems of record. This ensures consistent data management and means educators never have to import or export data themselves.

Integration with official systems enables:

• Student and staff rostering
• Parent account setup and ongoing management
• Schedule, timetable and room assignment availability in Edsby
• Attendance (viewing from the SIS or passback from Edsby)
• Grade passback from Edsby
• Report cards within Edsby
• And more

Edsby has built integrations with dozens of student information and other systems around the world. Integration is a core requirement, and unique competency, of the Edsby platform. From 1970s mainframes to flat files, there is no system Edsby has not been able to integrate with.

Robust optional analytics give administrators and teachers insight into student performance, attendance trends, engagement and more. This supports finding students at-risk, and facilitating intervention and related decision-making at classroom, district or even regional levels.

Educators can use Edsby to visualize school, district or regional data. Users only see data to which they’re entitled.

• Parents can see latest achievement, attendance and other data for their children
• Teachers only see information on students they currently teach
• Principals can only analyze their school
• Regional admins see data across all

Data can be pulled from anywhere, not just Edsby. And, once assembled and normalized, can be pushed to organizations for local storage and further manipulation and analysis. Whole countries are using Edsby for student data analytics and insights.

Lots of things in K-12 happen outside the classroom. Edsby features professional, structured communication for school-wide, district-wide or even region-wide news distribution to students, parents and staff. A well-thought-out workflow allows school offices or regional admins to select audiences, approve and manage posts.

Guidance counsellors. Parents. Educators. Administrators. Everyone important to a child’s education can communicate via secure private 1:1 messaging in Edsby. No cryptic, hard-to-remember email addresses. No manually maintained mail lists for teachers. And Edsby retains all sent and received messages, so there’s always record of who wrote what.

Red bubbles inside Edsby always flag new messages from teachers, grades, homework assignments and more. Read something, and the bubble goes away. Classroom only sends emails when new things are posted, which creates email overload and makes it impossible to know what’s new, just looking at Classroom.

Use Edsby to give sports teams and school clubs their own online collaboration spaces. Calendar entries in Edsby groups roll up into members’ personal calendars. Groups include their own wiki-like knowledge bases. Every Edsby group always has a staff moderator, and a “report inappropriate” feature flags content for adult review.