Edsby review

Edsby is a K-12 platform for the teaching side of school data: attendance, gradebooks, assessment evidence, report cards, class pages and contact with parents. It comes from CoreFour Inc., a Canadian company formed in 2010 by the team that built the FirstClass messaging and learning system in the 1990s. Edsby works with a district’s student information system rather than replacing it, so enrollment and scheduling stay in the SIS while teachers, students and parents do their daily work in Edsby. School boards in Ontario and Manitoba use it, along with US districts such as Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida, and Edsby says it serves 800,000 learners across New Zealand.

Who it’s for

Edsby fits school boards and districts that already have an SIS for the back office but want teachers to stop logging into it. A teacher in an Ontario secondary school can take attendance, record evidence against curriculum expectations, write report card comments and post the week’s homework in one place, and parents see the results in the same app.

It suits systems that grade against standards or curriculum expectations. Edsby lets teachers attach standards to both formative and summative tasks and keep the evidence next to the mark.

A school that needs a full SIS should look elsewhere first. Edsby relies on the SIS for enrollment, timetables and government reporting. It connects to systems such as PowerSchool SIS and Aeries for that.

What it does well

Attendance takes two taps, and Edsby pre-marks absences that families have already reported. A parent who reports a dentist appointment in the app at 7:30 saves the office a phone call and the teacher a wrong mark. Attendance and grades sync back to the SIS, so nobody re-enters them.

Assessment and reporting are the core. Teachers can use their district’s traditional or standards-based scheme, record formative evidence such as observations and conversations, and see it alongside summative marks. When report cards are switched on, teachers write them on the same screen as the evidence, with comment banks to speed things up. A teacher writing 60 report card comments in a weekend can check what a student actually did before writing “consistently demonstrates”.

The class side covers what most teachers need from an LMS. Each class has a timeline, homework, units and a library of resources, and teachers choose whether parents can see the class feed. Edsby offers one-to-one messages and broadcast email to families without keeping separate mailing lists, and parents can book parent-teacher interviews in the app.

Edsby integrates with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, so teachers can keep using the files they already have.

Where it falls short

Edsby adds a layer rather than removing one. You still need an SIS, a contract for it and someone to keep the sync healthy. If the sync fails, teachers see the wrong class lists in Edsby until someone fixes it. Ask which SIS connections Edsby supports for your system and who handles sync problems.

Several tools are optional components with their own price, including Forms and Workflows, the Destinations competency tracker, student analytics, conference scheduling and the Teacher AI Assistant. A demo that shows everything may not match what your quote includes.

What parents see depends on the school. The school sets up guardian accounts and decides what each guardian can see, so two schools in the same board can look different to a family. Our parent communication policy guide helps you agree on the settings across schools.

Pricing

Edsby does not publish prices. Boards and districts contact the sales team for a quote, and the optional components, including the AI assistant, cost extra. Ask for a breakdown, along with the cost of SIS integration and training.

Privacy and data

Edsby says the education organization owns all data in its Edsby system, that it does not sell personal information or user content, shows no advertising, and does not send marketing messages to students, parents or staff. It says it is funded by fees from education organizations. Edsby runs on Microsoft Azure and says all customer data, including backups, stays in the customer’s country: Canadian customers in Canadian Azure data centres, US customers in US data centres, and Australian and New Zealand customers in Australian data centres.

Edsby has held ISO 27001 certification since August 2021, with annual third-party review. It has signed the US Student Data Privacy Consortium’s National Data Privacy Agreement, and it reports a “Pass” rating from Common Sense Media’s privacy program.

The Teacher AI Assistant works differently. Edsby says it uses Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service in the US and processes user names, assessment data and course content, while also saying it anonymizes personal data it passes along. Canadian boards with data residency rules should check this before turning it on. Our AI policy for schools covers what to decide first.

Verdict

Edsby is a good choice for Canadian boards and US districts that want one teacher-facing place for attendance, evidence-based assessment, report cards and parent contact, on top of the SIS they already run. Its in-country hosting and no-advertising stance are strong points. Schools that want one system to do everything, including enrollment and scheduling, should look at a full SIS from our student information rankings.

See the best Edsby alternatives