A great improvement from other products, but room to improve.
What do you like best?
Tyler has made it much easier for teachers to take attendance and enter grades with fewer "clicks" and getting it all done faster. The customization in the grade book is extremely helpful and allows teachers to customize in any way they want, including color coding by performance. It makes it much easier for teachers to tell by a quick glance how their students are doing overall, and it is very helpful to make incompletes or missing assignments stand out as a visual reminder. I also appreciate the seating chart feature that allows you to create one using student pictures (even though I have not chosen to use it).
What do you dislike?
We have been promised time and time again that Tyler SIS is capable of taking data (whether it's attendance, grades, discipline, etc) and organizing it or presenting it on demand. We have had very little success seeing this at the teacher level, with many requests remaining unfulfilled. If it really can do this, then it is difficult enough to where we have not been able to really take advantage of this feature.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Some have complained about having to "learn everything all over" when Tyler SIS updates to a new version, but I look at this as positives. The updates are done to make it perform better, faster, and to include things requested by schools.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
It allows my school to take attendance, track parent contacts, assign discipline, and enter grades. Everything we need as teachers, administrators, and administrative assistants can all be accomplished here. Tyler SIS has also allowed teachers and administrators to be on the same page when it comes to questions about previous interventions or parent contacts. For example, if a parent says they have never been called by their child's teacher, a principal can pull up the log of parent contacts and check to see if that is true. On the teacher side, teachers can enter the type of contact (with an amazing variety of choices) as well as the result of that contact (along with notes, time, date, etc).
