Show My Homework / Satchel:One - Good/Mediocre/Bad?

[pete]

Who's currently (I've spotted a few old threads) using it and how is it to use from a parent / teacher / office admin / IT perspective?

 

One of our schools is looking at it, but I'm leery of giving YetAnotherLogin to parents unless the utility/polish outweighs the faffing (on everyone's part).

 

I'm at the DPIA stage and I've already run into the all-too-common "why yes, we do automatically sync with your source-of-truth, but we don't honour any data deletion requests from your source-of-truth" KB article, which isn't a great start.

 

(Satchel:One/SMH reps - we're already speaking with you)

[simpsonj]

The school has used it for years, tied into our RM Unify to *simplify* logins. By and large, teachers like it and use it regularly, parents seem to rate it, and office staff have nothing to do with it as it syncs directly to our MIS. The two issues we have are when the sync fails (usually not Satchel:One's fault) and students not using RM Unify to sign in.

 

The first lesson in IT is all about how to sign into RM Unify and Satchel:One, so that helps with the latter immensely, but we still have numerous students over the course of the year not getting it. But you can also use O365, Google or Azure AD for SSO if you prefer.

[TheRobins]

Hi Pete,

 

My experience with SMHW. We had it back in 2015 and it really made a change to parental engagement with homework at the time. When GDPR was introduced that were the best supplier I dealt with by far, their policies were on the ball and we have a personal consultation with one of their team to document and go through all data coming from our site to them, and what they did with it.

 

At the start of the Pandemic we relied heavily on SMHW, they were very quick to make changes to their site and help implement remote learning as well as ramp up their capacity to deal with the sudden surge in demand. Whilst this was going on internally we increased pace on our Teams deployment as we felt it could better support the remote learning. By October last year we had transitioned into TEAMS and pupils were successfully using it from home and on site. Decision was made to fully move all remote learning and homework function to Teams now that staff and students were using it successfully. We have no ceased using SMHW as Teams ticks all of its boxes and more for us.

 

I would say SMHW has the following strengths.

 

- Seating Plan addon, very good and helps teachers with new classes and also support SEN seating plans.

- Parental engagement, parents had their own app which could be used for multiple students

- Does what it says on the tin, we used O365 authentication for Staff and Students.

 

Costs had increased quite a bit recently and our move to teams is a positive move, not that SMHW wasn't any good but times are changing and I feel it may lose its market share slowly.

[Boredguy]

We've been using it for a while with not issues, we use SSO with 365 for the staff and students, and parents have their own login to see the kids homework etc which is based on their mobile phone number set in you MIS.

 

So far not had any issues with the sync and as it's using 365 to authenticate it's easier for the kids as it's the same interface for that and 365 (plus we've also added a app shortcut in the 365 dashboard to take them straight there too)

[hardtailstar]

We used to have it but moved to Google Classroom during the pandemic.

 

When it works it is really good and the support are really helpful.

 

If like us you move students up in July to the next year group after year 11 & 13s leave. Essentially you have a month where you cant use it as it does the whole year change over according to Academic year in SIMs

 

I know that is a school issue and not SMHW but they said for a few years that they would implement something for this as we werent the only school to do this but they hadnt done it by the time we left.

 

Apart from that it was really useful, the reason we left was to save money and go full Google.

 

What worked well for us as a school was having a member of teaching staff as an Admin dealing with password resets etc. Any technical stuff they would send to us. We also had a dedicated email for it so that parents/students could email that.

[pete]

Those of you who've moved from SMH to full Teams*, how have you made sure parents are kept in the loop? Parent Summary emails (or whatever 365 calls them)?

 

*which we're currently using.

 

Edit: - Yeah, I had queries about how granular the backend permissions were. Ideally I'd want to give "you can reset parent passwords / resend links" to certain people outside IT, but keep the "you can break SMH/SSO/Sync" restricted to IT.

Edited May 14, 2021 by pete

[Boredguy]

Those of you who've moved from SMH to full Teams*, how have you made sure parents are kept in the loop? Parent Summary emails (or whatever 365 calls them)?

 

*which we're currently using.

 

Edit: - Yeah, I had queries about how granular the backend permissions were. Ideally I'd want to give "you can reset parent passwords / resend links" to certain people outside IT, but keep the "you can break SMH/SSO/Sync" restricted to IT.

 

Our Data Manager is a full admin on SMH, but all the staff are not, since to reset a password they only need to be able to do it on the network since we use the SSO via 365 Azure and not the built in accounts in SMH

[pete]

^ Is your data manager handling the reset of parent logins too? Student and staff are easy, it's typically parent logins / queries that take more time because of incomplete information being passed on. Giving "can send the parent a reset link" permissions to the person who answers the call makes it more reliable.

[Boredguy]

Yes the Data Manager is the first port of call for any parental queries regarding it and she resets the passwords as required as the reception team struggle enough with resetting a student password via the intranet, never mind them having to do it via another site

[TMBS]

We've been using it for a couple of years now. It was mainly purchased to stop SLT having the arguements with parents over Johnny getting a comment for not doing his homework! They are now informed of all Johnny's homework via the SMHW app - if they sign up!

 

On the whole it has worked really well. I manage and use as a teacher - install was easy, syncs overnight and we've set up single sign on with Google, so pretty seamless. I did query when setting up why they were pulling so much sensitive data from SIMS - SEN, etc. As the initial install document say we could specify. Was told it was for a module we didn't use so asked them not to select that data but they pretty much refused. I referred to our DPO to deal with that.

 

As a teacher it's really easy to use, set homework and mark. Intergrates nicely with Classroom. My only Google gripe is you can't add worksheet from Shared Drives in Google. Google Classroom does a lot more now, so I'm trying to move away from SMHW and move over to setting Classroom up with parents but staff/SLT don't like change!

[GREED]

What alternatives have you looked at for comparison?

 

MILK is another platform offering homework management and delivery.

 

https://www.milkapp.io/

 

I know a number of the MIS dabble in this space too.

[pete]

What alternatives have you looked at for comparison?

 

MILK is another platform offering homework management and delivery.

 

https://www.milkapp.io/

 

I know a number of the MIS dabble in this space too.

 

They haven't yet (they'll have to since the pricing is over the "get 3 quotes" limit).

 

I'm not convinced that we can't achieve it using existing tools, but I need to do some poking around.

[pete]

Bit of a thread necro, but how much of a faff was the Office 365 SSO to configure?

 

The customer-facing documentation is a wee bit sparse and we've checked our end but their application is giving the "well you logged into Azure AD OK, but there's no mapping between your Azure credentials email and an account in our application" error.

 

Which implies I'm waiting on them to do something since there's no "do X, Y and Z in a new enterprise app in Azure" instructions.

[Brimstone]

Showbie is by far a superior product to SMHW....

 

Has SSO for Google and MS.

[Boredguy]

Bit of a thread necro, but how much of a faff was the Office 365 SSO to configure?

 

The customer-facing documentation is a wee bit sparse and we've checked our end but their application is giving the "well you logged into Azure AD OK, but there's no mapping between your Azure credentials email and an account in our application" error.

 

Which implies I'm waiting on them to do something since there's no "do X, Y and Z in a new enterprise app in Azure" instructions.

 

Can't remember it being too bad, I followed the steps to set it up in Azure, then give the Data manger the nod to enable it in Satchel and that was it as long as the SIMS record had the students e-mail as their Work one (which we'd been doing anyway)