Great Platform for Schools

Works well with struggling teachers

Pros

This software works well when trying to develop struggling teachers. It allows you to give them feedback from actual lessons with the chance for them to see themselves. True growth can occur when used correctly.

Cons

Its a little hard to configure in the beginning but smooth after you play with it for a while...

Comprehensive and private

Great! As an instructional coach, private conversations that are non-evaluative need lead to growth. Teachers can be more vulnerable when looking at evidence when they know it is between us and that the evidence is there when they are in the coaching cycle.

Pros

The tool allows for private goal setting, communication, and evidence collection.

Cons

As a stand-alone and private tool, in education, it can feel like “one more thing.” I have to emphasize the fact that privacy features also mean it is self-contained.

Strong Mission and Responsive Staff, but Glitchy Product

It's a promising platform that has helped us unlock sharing potential in our organization. However, it feels on shaky technological ground for the ways our team uses it. As the administration liaison, I spend too much time putting out small fires and trying to understand what is a Sibme issue versus something a team member is doing wrong.

Pros

The core features are usually solid and intuitive to new users - adding team members, uploading and commenting on videos. As an education leadership coaching organization with over 50 coaches, we have used Sibme to help our coaches re-watch and improve upon their own practices by letting development conversations be grounded in real examples of their work. Plus, other non-coaching staff now have an easy window into coaching without pestering coaches! In our COVID virtual coaching environment, grounding org learning in video sharing was invaluable. It saves everyone time and the collaboration features to enhance this org learning (commenting, sharing, tagging pre-set categories) are easy to use.

Cons

Though the core service is solid, I encounter tech glitches and question marks at a frustratingly high rate. It's small things - user permission mismatch across pages, confusing naming conventions (the account wide "Admin-User-Viewer" and Huddle-level "Admin-Member-Viewer" have very similar names but different meanings, which is confusing), audio issues for uploads, and several areas of confusion or disconnect in the new Zoom-Sibme "Conference" integration. This latter piece would have been excellent to use in the COVID virtual coaching environment, but was troublesome enough that our team never meaningfully used the integration. More robust and coherent help guides on the Zoom-Sibme integration (with video!) would be a good start. Our customer service manager is very responsive and solutions-oriented and I'm grateful for her! But technical solutions seem slow and often incomplete.

Ease of implementation - multiple industry uses

We have been thoroughly pleased with the product and would recommend to others in higher ed or responsible for supporting early career teachers.

Pros

Very intuitive user interface, security/mobility of content, multiple uses to support interaction between small groups of educators or to support large conference-style events, efficiencies built into product and customizable by responsive development team.

Cons

Communication from within the system to end users can be excessive - ability to opt out of messages is a feature but less prominent in the user interface. Some analytics of interest are not yet available, but responsiveness of development team speaks to SIBME's ability to be adaptive.