managebac

Here at Rowland High School we use ManageBac. It is an amazingly simple time saver for students, Activity Advisors, Extended Essay Advisors, and the CAS Coordinator (hey, that’s me). I couldn’t do my job without it. Check out their website.

ManageBac is one of the first web-based solutions designed to help IB schools comprehensively manage their IB Diploma & Middle Years requirements. ManageBac centralizes IB records and deadlines, keeps students organized with a consolidated planner, and significantly reduces paperwork for teachers. It began with CAS, but expanded to cover EE, ToK & Internal Assessment requirements for the Diploma programme, and Community & Service and the Personal Project for the Middle Years programme.

This is what I like about ManageBac:

• I get automated email notifications each time a student adds, edits, or completes an activity.
• Students can post activities they’re planning to accomplish and visually see how many Learning Outcomes they’ll meet and how many hours they’ll achieve. Planning is built right in!
• Students can ask me questions and I can answer them through ManageBac without needing face-to-face office meetings, or students can message me and ask for an office meeting.
• If IBO asks for a random sample of my students’ CAS activities I can share it with them with the click of a button.
• I can print rosters, evidence… I can generate a report for anything I need.
• Customer support is AMAZINGLY fast, courteous, and helpful.
• All the CAS and IB handouts, documents, and literature are right here within ManageBac, as well as instructions on how to use ManageBac.
• I can upload files to share with students.
• I can post group messages to share with students that are also emailed to each student.
• Everything is paperless and stored on ManageBac’s secure servers. I don’t need to keep paper files anymore.
• If a student wants to turn in CAS stuff on paper instead of paperlessly they can.
• Adding and deleting students is a breeze.
• Students are digital natives and ManageBac’s web interface is what they know how to use intuitively.
• Everything is private. What one student posts is never seen by another student.
• I can add parents so they can monitor their child’s progress.
• I can add as many teachers as I want so they can use the built-in calendar, EE, TOK, and messaging features.
• This doesn’t have anything to do with CAS, but we can have students record their orals right to the ManageBac server saving us a ton of money in postage.

To be honest, ManageBac has expanded so much recently that I’m probably using only 25% of the program’s capabilities. I know it can do much more. If it weren’t for ManageBac I couldn’t do my job as a Guidance Counselor for over 600 students and also be the CAS Coordinator.

You can try it out for free too which is pretty sweet