Top 5 Ways Your LMS Can Save Teachers Time

School’s out for summer! Now is the time for educators everywhere to take a well-deserved break. The question is: what can schools do now to help their teachers and alleviate some of the back-to-school chaos that awaits them in the fall?

Teachers want to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time teaching and engaging with their students. School leadership and the families they serve want that, too. Here are 5 ways your LMS can help make that happen:

1. Everything in One Place

Start with a Learning Management System (LMS) that is fully integrated with your Student Information System (SIS). When the two systems are on the same platform under one login, teachers have one location to update student records of all sorts and administrators get consistent, reliable reporting on individual student, class, and grade-level academic progress.

Save teachers time by housing all their coursework in one system so they can easily reuse it for the next class of students. With a robust SIS/LMS, teachers don’t have to rely on paper files or disjointed systems, and they can easily track which topics resonated, which need updating, and where there may be gaps. When summer is coming to an end, teachers can look at all their existing files and resources and refresh what they want to reuse for the fall semester.

Once the semester begins, an integrated SIS/LMS means teachers have one portal to log attendance, assign and review homework, update their Gradebook, host student resources, and communicate with students and families. There’s no more need for separate logins or back and forth emails.

2. Student Engagement Tools

Teachers can save time trying to keep students engaged by creating and sharing interactive content, videos, quizzes, and simulations that can make learning more engaging and fun. A good SIS/LMS facilitates collaboration and group discussions among students and offers gamification features—such as points, badges, and leaderboards—that can motivate students to connect more actively with the course material.

Insights from the SIS/LMS can also help teachers personalize learning experiences for individual students based on their strengths, weaknesses, and interests.

3. Flexible and Customizable Grading Methods

Your SIS/LMS should enable flexible and customizable grading methods to meet a wide range of pedagogies. The best SIS/LMS will support mastery-based education, criteria-based assessments, self-assessments, gamification, and numeric or letter grades with the ability to add personalized comments to each student record. This allows teachers to tailor their grading methods to best suit their teaching style and the needs of their students.

Teachers should also be able to view aggregated year-over-year assessment results and determine trends or areas where students struggle. Having that historical data means they can identify subjects that need greater attention or a different approach to improve student understanding of the subject matter.

4. 360° Student View

A fully connected SIS/LMS means teachers, families, advisors, and administrators get a centralized overview of each student’s complete record. Schools can provide role-based and view-only access to everything, including:

• Contact/emergency/medical information
• Attendance and conduct records
• Teacher and advisor notes
• Class and extracurricular schedules
• Clubs and activities
• Dorm information
• Homework, grades, report cards, and transcripts
• Graduation progress and GPA

Blackbaud’s integrated SIS/LMS also has a “Find Me Now” feature that empowers teachers and administrators to locate students and other teachers in real time based on the day’s actual schedule, including rotations, custom days, and partial days.

5. Strategic Automation and AI

Your SIS/LMS can also save teachers’ time with strategic automation and workflows, Gradebook shortcuts, bulk actions, and cross-departmental collaboration tools. For example: when a teacher submits grades, the automated workflow puts a task on the appropriate admin’s dashboard to review and approve those grades, which they can do with the push of a button.

Blackbaud’s SIS/LMS has an AI-enabled question generator and assessment question banks to help K–12 educators develop class assignments, quizzes, and student assessments. We’re also developing an “at-risk” student tool to help teachers identify students in need of extra support by consolidating data on attendance, test scores, and work completion.

Families Benefit, Too

With a fully integrated SIS/LMS, when teachers update grades, attendance, assignments, conduct reports, etc., that information propagates across systems. Once submitted and approved by an administrator, the information is immediately accessible to students and their families. This streamlines the process for everyone and ensures that all information is consistent and up to date.

This also means that families can use one login to communicate with all their children’s teachers and school staff. Every class is in the same system, all grades and information are readily displayed, and the school-wide calendar and resource board are front and center, personalized to their children’s activities and interests.

Families can use that same login to update information on their end. For example, if the child has new medical history, a scheduled absence, or a change of address, parents and caregivers enter it through the centralized portal and all approved school stakeholders see it in the student record immediately. If you have Blackbaud’s Total School Solution, the relevant information populates the enrollment, financial aid, tuition, accounting, and fundraising systems, too.

A Fully Connected SIS/LMS Benefits Everyone

With an integrated SIS/LMS, there is one single source of truth for student data, so all stakeholders have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips.

For teachers, leveraging an integrated LMS/SIS can significantly enhance the teaching experience by streamlining administrative tasks, fostering student engagement, and providing valuable insights into student performance. Educators can focus more on what truly matters—inspiring and educating the next generation.