Mr. Frustrated Teacher

Bio

A super nice member!

Reviews

November 23, 2013

I, too started this account just to get the word out about what a disaster Edsby is for my district. From the very beginning, there were issues with the website and accessibility, to the point that we had to scrap all of our preplanning sessions for learning how to use Edsby. These issues have improved slightly but still are much worse than should be expected.
Then there is the program itself. It is by far and away the worst grading program I have ever seen. We used Easy Grade Pro previously and it allowed us to do SO many things for our students and parents. Edsby does NONE of those things. I could write a dozen pages on what its doesn’t do but here is a partial list (we are discovering new things that it won’t do every day it seems).
– Won’t allow you to print out decent class rosters…only option is one that only has student names.
– Won’t let you print student’s missing assignments for just your class (only the whole school and that not very well).
– Has NO ability to customize anything. There is only ONE type of Progress report and it is ridiculously horrible and unprofessional in appearance. I had to HAND WRITE Progress reports for my students. Took me 2 hours. I haven’t had to do that for 13 years!!! I guess they needed to help us use up all the ‘spare time’ week seem to have (sarcasm).
– Won’t allow you to keep attendance within the program.
– When a student messages you about an assignment it shows up in a huge slide out bar that covers 1/4 of the gradebook screen. Nobody can tell me how to stop it from popping out every time I access that gradebook page.
– Has a very archaic system of designating assignments and no way to personalize it to your needs like ALL other gradebook programs seem to have.
– It takes 10 times as long and 5 times as many steps to add assignments (which they call assessments no matter what).
– It takes 5-10 times as long to put new grades in.
– Has a hugely annoying problem….then you input a grade and hit enter (or down key) instead of moving to the next box down it sometimes jumps 2 boxes down and as many as 4 making you click in each box to add the grade…aRRGGHHH!!)
– In order to print out a class grade sheet (for posting) you first have to dump the data into an Excel spreadsheet, then take out all of the extraneous columns and rows and THEN print it. Easy Grade Pro could print these customized for me in less than 3 minutes. It took me 45 minute to do a simple set!!!
– Somehow nobody at this company realized our county doesn’t average 2nd quarter grades in with first…..we got to 2nd 9 weeks and it was simply adding the new grades to the 1st 9 weeks….I am still not that confident that it is averaging my grades correctly.
– I have had numerous complaints from parents that they HATE the parent portal as it doesn’t give them enough information and in a rational format for them to use. Most have simply quit using it (so much for its networking abilities).
– It DOES allow students to post messages…but they simply say hi, or your stink….useless.
– It’s little annoying tendencies are too many to even list.
I remember discovering Easy Grade Pro with my teaching team and we were frequently calling for each other to show something new and cool that it could do. With Edsby it is begging for anyone who has figured out how to do ANYTHING that we used to be able to do with ease. After 3 months of using it, I have NO feeling that they will EVER get this right and make it a decent program. It is crushing student and parent involvement in grade monitoring but nobody in the district wants to admit it.
Edsby is a DISASTER….stay FAR away from it or you will regret it. We seem to be stuck with it and I imagine they will blame the teachers for it eventually.

Shelves