THOUGHTS ON MANAGEBAC

It’s no secret that I love anything to do with planners and planning tools. Throw me into a new school, and one of the first things I will do is check out the tools at their disposal, which brings me to the latest system I have had the opportunity to explore – ManageBac. As with most planning platforms available in the field of education these days, ManageBac also prides itself on assessment and reporting; the one difference between ManageBac and other planning platforms is that ManageBac specifically caters to the International Baccalaureate (IB) programme. After playing around with the site, I have to say that ManageBac, although it has some great features, fell short of my expectations of an ideal planning platform for several reasons, but let’s start with the pros:

The Pros

• The ability to collaborate in real-time – which is a must for any school wanting teachers to team plan.
• The ability to track attendance and student behavior.
• The Whole-School Curriculum is nicely laid out and user-friendly.
  
• The drop-down menus/tick boxes for curriculum related objectives are great – they eliminate a lot of the copy and pasting.
  
• Their curriculum analytics shows the Program of Inquiry, including Units of Inquiry by grade level, Transdisciplinary Theme, Curriculum Overview showing Curriculum & Standards coverage, analytics for ATL Skills, Key Concepts and more.
  
• Access to a gradebook and assessment tools are great features.
  
• Report cards can easily be created, proofread and printed off.
• Student portfolios and assessments can easily be created.
• Both students and parents have access to ManageBac.
• The dashboards for teachers, students and parents are easy to navigate.
• Messaging and notifications on important events and updates.
• ManageBac can be used on any mobile device.
• A user-friendly way of collecting evidence for IB will be added in the near future.
• You can send your planners straight to IB for review from ManageBac.
• They have joined forces with Atlas Rubicon.
• ManageBac is excellent in their response time should your school have issues.

The Cons

• This idea of a “turnkey” platform where everything is pre-made for a school. Not all schools have the same vision or needs regardless of the fact that they are an IB school.
  
• The layout of the planners is the same for all teachers regardless of whether you are a specialist teacher, mainstream teacher, support staff, etc.
• Their solution for split-classes or multi-level classes is to complete two planners for a class – this is actually not necessary and with the right planning tool, this could be done on one form.
• The unit planner is poorly laid-out, and I know from sitting in team meetings that as you move from one box to the next, you lose your train of thought. There is a constant need to scroll up and down, and eventually we ended up ticking boxes just to get the job done. I know I have flagged this as a ManageBac problem – but I feel this is also partly the fault of IB as their own suggested planners result in much the same issue.
• The platform is missing lesson planning tools (I see on the website that this is being addressed). While it’s nice having a unit plan, unless you are forced back to the system to lesson plan, you won’t and therefore ManageBac really becomes a tool you open once at the beginning of a unit and once at the end – that’s it. A glorified tool for ticking off a box in the list of a school’s IB requirements.
• ManageBac falls short of helping a school create transdisciplinary planners – although a group of teachers may sit around to plan together – the layout is not conducive for teachers to see how they all connect and the links that can be made between subject areas.

Is ManageBac Right for Your School?

If your school is looking for a way to organize information for the sake of organizing information and meeting IB requirements, then yes, ManageBac could be a good solution. You will be able to easily submit necessary documents to IB and know that they are in the right format. Similar to most platforms out there, real-time collaboration, access to a gradebook, the ability to take attendance, student and parent portals, etc. are all included, which is great.

But is ManageBac the ideal planning solution? In my opinion, no, and where they fail is this idea of a ‘turnkey’ solution, because in education there is no such thing. There are individual schools with individual needs that require customized solutions. Where ManageBac also fails is in disregarding the fact that all teacher planners do not need to look alike, and it does not provide an adequate solution for transdisciplinary planning.

In short, if you are looking for a safe bet to get the job done, then ManageBac is for you. If your school is looking for an outside-the-box, innovative and customized planning platform that will allow for a cohesive and well-connected teaching culture to transpire at yours school, then my suggestion is to look elsewhere.

Further Reading

The Technology to Set Education Free
The Power of Planners
Individualized Teacher Planners: Do They Really Work?
Different Planning Solutions for Your School
Tips for Personalizing Planners at Your School
The Tool Successful Companies Use That Schools Need