Cornerstone Christian Academy is a kindergarten through eighth grade school in Vancouver, Washington. Cornerstone’s curriculum is designed to push the technology envelope to prepare students for the workforce of the future and for the collaborative world in which they will live.
Cornerstone began looking at learning management systems (LMS) after realizing their current system was outdated and expensive to operate. They sought a school technology platform that would work seamlessly with Microsoft Office 365. After looking into the Skooler LMS with its full suite of features and tight integration with Office 365, they knew Skooler was the right solution for their school.
Skooler provides a highly flexible, full-featured LMS that integrates with Office 365 and other applications to provide a solution that can easily be tailored to meet the requirements of individual schools.
Throughout the deployment process, the Skooler team worked closely with Cornerstone staff to ensure the solution would accommodate all of their school information and reporting needs.
A number of additions and enhancements were made; specifically, grading became more streamlined, attendance was adapted to Cornerstone’s unique needs and the addition of Clever in the 3rd party app frame of Skooler now allows students to log in to all the apps Cornerstone uses on campus under one password.
“These additions were all part of conversations with the Skooler team, and then the team made them happen. This was the ultimate customer support! Skooler has been a great addition to our program. The team is great to work with and the platform has been nothing but simple to learn and helpful on all levels, including administration and parents.”
Mike Hoff, Principal K-8 Cornerstone
Christian Academy
How Skooler has made a difference
Information is easily accessible. The Cornerstone staff can access all parts of Office 365 through their Skooler portal. Teachers can load information directly from Office 365 to Skooler, including lesson plans, parents or student notes, assignments, reports and other relevant communications.
Better collaboration. Skooler’s integration with Microsoft Teams introduced Cornerstone to this flexible collaboration technology. Teams allows Cornerstone to create focus groups, facilitates collaboration among staff and teachers and offers more ways to engage with parents and students. Cornerstone is continuing to discover more ways to use Teams – and it’s getting great reviews.
Simplifying processes for teachers. The teachers at Cornerstone have benefited from the change to Skooler in a number of ways. The simplicity of having lesson plans, grades and standards all in one place allows teachers to plan, attach standards and then review the standards taught throughout the school year. This means teachers spend less time on administrative tasks and more time working with students.
Students learn the tools of the working world. Because Skooler is integrated with Microsoft Office, students can use OneNote for notetaking and to collaborate on class projects, and they learn to use familiar business applications like Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint to do their schoolwork. From writing reports in Word to creating graphs and charts in Excel to making class presentations using PowerPoint or Sway, students gain experience using tools they’ll continue to use after they graduate. And teachers can deliver comments right in the applications – saving paper and keeping school work and feedback connected to the Skooler LMS.
Easier communication between parents and teachers. Another benefit has been the ease of communication between teachers and parents. Lesson plans, grades and personal communications are all part of the tools teachers share with parents over the school year. With the Parent Portal and Parent app, Skooler makes it easy to share this information with parents, and it allows the school to keep parents informed about school activities, weather-related closures and any other relevant information.
Since using Skooler, parents have noted how much more informed they feel about what their students are doing and how much progress they are making. It creates a sense of accountability for students and enables teachers to build stronger relationships with families in support of better education for their children.
“Skooler is wonderful and is a game changer for our school. It is forcing the standards to be adhered to. It is bringing our parents, teachers and technology together like we have never been able to do before.”
Mike Hoff, Principal K-8 Cornerstone
Christian Academy
