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Mobile access to your SIS

Several student information system (SIS) vendors offer to sync data with a Palm Pilot or Windows Mobile PDA. This is a handy feature for teachers on field trips, assistant principals stalking the halls, etc.
Written by Christopher Dawson, Contributor

Several student information system (SIS) vendors offer to sync data with a Palm Pilot or Windows Mobile PDA. This is a handy feature for teachers on field trips, assistant principals stalking the halls, etc. It's fairly limited in it's utility, though since it generally only provides a static subset of the data in your SIS (student names, contacts, and pictures, for example).

What would be far cooler is a web-based SIS with a mobile site. Google does it with mobile apps and Gmail. So does Yahoo. However, I'm not aware of any SIS vendors that do it.

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I know that our vendor, X2, reports decent support of the full site on the iPhone, but what about us Crackberry addicts? Smartphones are proliferating like crazy and are becoming cheaper and more full-featured than ever. I find that I need my computer far less frequently since I can send emails and get online so easily with my phone.

This isn't a deal breaker for me...I'm hardly going to migrate to the first SIS I find that offers live mobile access. However, the ability to interact with my district's data, or even to simply reset a user's password via my phone would be one heck of a sweet deal. Talk back below if you've had any experience with mobile-optimized products.

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