For a long school year such as a semester or a full year it has been phenomenal as a portfolio for classes with my students

As a teacher I can say that Alma is one of the best virtual classrooms that I have tried, it is an all-in-one and something that I love is the management of evaluations and students without having to resort to any other external platform. The function that I use the most is evaluative management since right there I can check my lists for the student report card system as well as the grade assigned to the same task and document

It is difficult to say that Alma has something bad, rather something not so good and that is first-hand integration, but once learned it is phenomenal

Alma has allowed us to improve our communications within the school and with parents and students. Parents and students can see middle school students' grades and assignments. We also use it to broadcast emergency messages such as snow day closings.

Alma is very easy to learn and to use. It has a lot of great features that make it flexible for the needs of different schools. Most importantly, the customer service is fantastic. They get back to you quickly, are helpful, even pleasant with some of my "stupid" questions to which I should know the answer and are open to ideas for improvements and new features.

Some may wish for an "all-in-one" SIS/LMS system. Alma is more an SIS+ with some features that would allow a school to get away without an LMS, but certainly not all the features one would find in a combined SIS/LMS system. However, I think this is a good thing, as it provides flexibility to meet the needs of particular schools. For example, we are a Google Classroom school and don't currently use a full featured LMS such as Schoology or Canvas.

none.

You can log in quickly. The people who have come in to assist with how horrific this year has been have been mostly humble and at least tried to help.

Absolutely impossible to have what we need at our hands as high school counselors. Everything is laborious or actually impossible to do. It has taken MONTHS to get even tiny bits of advances to make this usable. Transcripts, which are an essential piece for our kids, took 6 months to have functioning, and they're still inaccurate. Scheduling is months behind because the programming is inept for a school this size. It lacks confidentiality and privacy that's important for our students. Household units are not available, access to other buildings makes it impossible to know who has siblings and other people living in their home, which poses a safety issue when filing reports to CPS, report cards are still completely wrong and inaccurate. I could truly go on for an awfully long time, but I digress. At the end of the day, I think I can vouch for every person in my building when I say that this program was rolled out in a deplorable way, changes and improvements are slow and sometimes non-existent, and it's made me reconsider even working in this corporation due to how terrible this system is. A program in its infancy has been detrimental to every single stakeholder in this corporation, and I've been disappointed since the first day of training in August.

They are a fantastic company with a bright future ahead of them. I'm happy to support them, enjoy using their product, and appreciate their customer service.

The main selling point from Alma was the ease of use. Out of all of the systems I've demoed and tried, it was easily the easiest to log in, poke around, and figure out how to do what I needed to do with minimal training. The second selling point is their customer service. Absolutely top notch. Their people are friendly, very responsive, and (most importantly) humans. I enjoy talking to them! I can usually get a response from a rep within minutes and even our teachers are welcome to message them with questions. The third selling point is that they are new system with a considerably active development cycle. We knew, going into it, that they wouldn't be as fully fleshed out as competitors like PowerSchool. That also means that it's easier for newer and fresher ideas to be implemented. It's not built on some old archaic database. Many of the features they do have that I use regularly such as the Report Card Builder and the Spreadsheet Data Editor/Report builder are very well done. We regularly get emails about new features being added and they listen to their customers when new features are requested. They've given us a lot of new toys since we first signed on with them. The final selling point is narwhals.

Probably the biggest issue that I face regularly is that their district level stuff isn't as fleshed out as I would like it to be. Many of the cool features that are available at each of the schools I manage can't be done in the district portion, aggregating all data and whatnot. I've been told they are working on that stuff though!