Alma SIS reviews

We bought it with my friends who has brother or sister ages under 14 so we discovered it is useful for their education life and psychology.

Videos sometimes lose their charm for the children who has hyperactivity problem.

I LOVE the customer service. They are always willing to work with us and help us adapt the program to what we need. I love the many different reporting features and how they each have a unique description that helps me find exactly what I need. I also like that I can star the reports I frequently use. I like that I am able to easily fill in grades in the "gradebook" tab, as well as having the opportunity to quickly report final grades at the end of the term. I am also happy with the ease in resetting a password for a user who has forgotten theirs as well as the quick ability to change a username. I appreciate that many users can have access to the same information (meaning a student and both of their parents can have their own accounts but access the same information on their child). I think overall I am mostly impressed with Alma's support team, how quickly and professionally they respond, how they will not let me leave the conversation until they are satisfied that all of my questions have been answered and my concerns resolved, and I love that they are constantly updating, making the website better, and then sending out an email with all of the updates and detailed instructions on how to utilize them.

I feel the website could be slightly more user friendly. There are often times it takes longer than I would like to access the information that I need (a lot of clicking through redundant tabs and not a lot of short cuts). I also wish it was easier for parents to understand the website. I don't like that there is no easy way for a parent to access a student's missing work, instead having to look through each class and assignment to see what has and has not been turned in. I also wish there was a way for us, as administrators and teachers, to see exactly what the parents see. It is hard to give advice and support to a parent when their screen looks different from mine; and I often don't know if they can see everything that I can, like all of the notes and assignment descriptions and what not. Otherwise, I am mostly happy with Alma.

Alma SIS has some of the best tech support, one on one access all the time. They are always considering feedback and ways to implement when possible.

Some of the things that I request for feedback don't always get completed but they have their reasonings for that.

Alma is so easy to build out and use. They get more and more features every year.....For example, we can now import new student information, and easily run all of our NYS reports. It's really amazing how comprehensive yet seemingly simple Alma is at each user level. I think that because it's on the newer end of student information systems, the interface is just simpler...they don't need to account for decades' worth of data that was entered in a certain way years and years ago.

The recently changed their customer support to a tiered system, making it more difficult to get answers quickly. That said, the system is simple enough that questions don't come up all that often. Also, they are building out their SFTP capacity, but I wish it could communicate directly with our lottery/enrollment system.

Easiest platform for communicating with staff, students and families.

Setting up registration each year. Sometimes I would miss one small part and once parents started the process I couldn't go back and make adjustments.

I like how user friendly the system is. Families, students, and staff are able to navigate Alma with ease.

We look forward to Alma implementing some kind of texting in the future hopefully!

The ease of use and functionality. It is very intuitive.

Difficulty to look at/find students in different ways, ie Grade, Groups, Activities

Very strong design-sense, and improving their app-center interface. Customer Service is fantastic.

Their admissions platform needs to advance to include billing/tuition.

The software enables us to have all the data related to students, teachers, curriculum and assessment in one place. There are many things that are just "one click" tasks and things don't have to be re-done at the beginning of each school year. They can just be copied, transferred, modified... I also like that there is always a solution to everything, even if an option does not exist in the system, the support team helps find ways to make sure we get what we need.

There are some things that we would like to have. For example: the option to show attendance on the report card per class (as opposed to per day), or the option to include a digital signature on the cover. These are some tiny things that we have found ways to resolve, but we have communicated them with the support team and we feel confident that they take our feedback into consideration.

I love how user friendly Alama is. There is a lot of information that this software contains, but it is easy to navigate and fairly simple to use.

I think the most difficult thing to navigate is just the linking to Google Classroom. It's not impossible to figure out but I haven't devoted much time to get it set up and working to a level that I like yet.

Calculating marks, organizing curiculum, making notes and comments about the student's marks are all bundled up into one interface. Compiles comments and report card creation onto one PDF that is simple to use.

Inputting assignments and assigning them manually is tedious. The "Save" button and "Submit for Review" button are both the same size despite the "Save" button being the more important one during report cards submissions.

The option to send mass emails and messages to parents and students.

Not having incorporation with Ed Plan, and options for specific fields.

There are concessions made to narrative evaluation, which is great for an alternative school. Each block, the system gets cleaner and easier to handle as we write our evaluations for the kids, and, since our output is so much more complex than a single letter grade, it’s really important that the cognitive overhead for each evaluation be as small as possible. I’m really gratified that Alma continually improves this aspect.

Touchscreen integration is clunky but getting less so. It’s often hard to see what I’m doing, as column headers disappear as I scroll. There are a bunch of interface elements like this that make interactions awkward or repetitive, which induces frustration and boredom, which leads to errors.

It feels like evaluations are 90° off. I want to be able to evaluate a student, but it’s easiest to evaluate not only one class at a time, but one skill for the whole class at a time. It discourages thinking holistically about individual students and encourages comparing them in each skill. I think this makes it harder to do evaluations and makes them less accurate.

Daily evaluation notes go nowhere. We take attendance each day, which is dutifully reported, but any qualitative expression we have is thrown away. This does a great disservice to students because it means that, in the course of a day, it’s harder to make qualitative assessments of a student, leaving us only with their attendance data — a quantification that’s easy on a database designer but is hostile to learning.

It is intuitive and easy to manage. Tasks such as scheduling is easy and quick. The Alma Start module allows you to quickly set up processes for registering / approving and enrolling new students.

The documentation could be better. There is no one Administration guide to get all the answer from. A chat feature from support would be a great help to get an answer quickly for simple questions.

It looks pretty and professional. The student/parent side looks clean.

1. They have sold their scheduling I think to some 3rd party so none of the accessible API will allow you to access the times classes are happening. Truly a nightmare for integrations.
2. Customer service is atrocious. No one answers the phone and he text based service takes over an hour to get a copy pasted answer. Then the help person leaves and won't have a conversation with you.
3. Their reports are unusably bad. Truly nothing is in depth or customizable. This is beta software at best.
4. Nothing can be imported, everything from proficiency sets to data must be uploaded by hand one at a time, hope you like to copy and paste.
5. Admin can't do anything to set up classes. Teachers need to redo work a hundred times over.

Web based
Fast
Quick support
Google SSO
SAS

Email editor is TOO basic.
Report writer is not flexible, cost per extra fields.
Retrieve unenrolled student's data from previous years should be easier.
Apply changes to multiple classes, schedules, etc should allow to select randomly or by criteria.
Backup/Restore feature not available.
Mixed Letter, Numbers and Standards based grades are not compatible.
Transcripts reports must allow more flexible design.

This software allows me to easily interact with our entire student body by accessing contact information and schedules for each student.

I haven't found anything I don't like so far with this software.

Alma is very easy to use, even for those that are not particularly proficient with technology. It's functionality is improved from other SIS programs I have used in the past (Progressbook and Power School). As an administrator, I have far more control to make changes and adjustments that fit my staff and students. The customer support team is also very helpful and responsive.

There are some features that are missing. We have requested GPA-based grade calculation and some additions to transcripts that have not yet been implemented. However, several other features that we have requested have been implemented over the past two years.