Sibme

Works well with struggling teachers

Pros:

This software works well when trying to develop struggling teachers. It allows you to give them feedback from actual lessons with the chance for them to see themselves. True growth can occur when used correctly.

Cons:

Its a little hard to configure in the beginning but smooth after you play with it for a while...

Ease of implementation - multiple industry uses

Comments: We have been thoroughly pleased with the product and would recommend to others in higher ed or responsible for supporting early career teachers.

Pros:

Very intuitive user interface, security/mobility of content, multiple uses to support interaction between small groups of educators or to support large conference-style events, efficiencies built into product and customizable by responsive development team.

Cons:

Communication from within the system to end users can be excessive - ability to opt out of messages is a feature but less prominent in the user interface. Some analytics of interest are not yet available, but responsiveness of development team speaks to SIBME's ability to be adaptive.

Strong Mission and Responsive Staff, but Glitchy Product

Comments: It's a promising platform that has helped us unlock sharing potential in our organization. However, it feels on shaky technological ground for the ways our team uses it. As the administration liaison, I spend too much time putting out small fires and trying to understand what is a Sibme issue versus something a team member is doing wrong.

Pros:

The core features are usually solid and intuitive to new users - adding team members, uploading and commenting on videos. As an education leadership coaching organization with over 50 coaches, we have used Sibme to help our coaches re-watch and improve upon their own practices by letting development conversations be grounded in real examples of their work. Plus, other non-coaching staff now have an easy window into coaching without pestering coaches! In our COVID virtual coaching environment, grounding org learning in video sharing was invaluable. It saves everyone time and the collaboration features to enhance this org learning (commenting, sharing, tagging pre-set categories) are easy to use.

Cons:

Though the core service is solid, I encounter tech glitches and question marks at a frustratingly high rate. It's small things - user permission mismatch across pages, confusing naming conventions (the account wide "Admin-User-Viewer" and Huddle-level "Admin-Member-Viewer" have very similar names but different meanings, which is confusing), audio issues for uploads, and several areas of confusion or disconnect in the new Zoom-Sibme "Conference" integration. This latter piece would have been excellent to use in the COVID virtual coaching environment, but was troublesome enough that our team never meaningfully used the integration. More robust and coherent help guides on the Zoom-Sibme integration (with video!) would be a good start. Our customer service manager is very responsive and solutions-oriented and I'm grateful for her! But technical solutions seem slow and often incomplete.

Cal U Review

Comments: I love Sibme. It has made my work more seamless, provided more options for coaching teacher candidates, and allowed me to continue to do my job efficiently when I wouldn't be able to otherwise (e.g., video-coach during the pandemic when schools weren't allowing visitors). It has allowed me and my colleagues to develop new assignments in my courses, particularly peer-observation. It has also made a once excruciating assignment (video-recording yourself teaching) an acceptable and desirable task. Moreover, the customer service is wonderful! [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] have been so helpful, and I appreciate that they keep me on my toes with check-ins. I also appreciate all of the Learning Center material.

Pros:

Sibme as alot of great features that are useful for my work with teachers candidates. It's particularly impactful in supporting teacher candidate growth through the video-recording and time-stamped feedback. It's also useful for the supervisor to document strengths and needs for the candidates. I particularly like that I can attached my feedback to our clinical practice tool that I entered into the platform. Also, I like the different options it provides for observations (live, scripted notes, video-recording). Moreover, Sibme is always coming out with features that are helpful to my work. For example, I'm excited to learn more about the Goals feature. We require our candidates to develop a professional growth plan based on goals that they have been working on, and the Goals feature is a tool that I believe could support that task.

Cons:

I'd like to be able to obtain more data analytics on teacher candidate performance based on my inputs. For example, being able to look at the data for cohorts of teachers rather than just individuals. Overall, I feel like I'm still learning about the software, so I may not be using the data analytics to its full extent.

Accessible to all user abilities

Comments: I was first drawn to use the Sibme platform because of the accessibility and friendliness of our Sibme contacts. During the training sessions we became more convinced that this was the correct product for our student teachers’ observations. It proved to be even more worthwhile than we could have imagined. We were able to incorporate our own observation rubrics and customize the platform to work best for our programs. The student teachers find it very easy to use and even our veteran mentors quickly caught on to how the platform operates. The Sibme platform provided our university and entrée into remote observations even prior to the current pandemic.

Pros:

We have a variety of users from very technology challenged to technology is second nature. With a combination of strong training from Sibme and a good product and customer service all of our users were able to quickly access the platform to support student teachers.

Cons:

Since this product was originally created for Lowe usage in elementary and secondary school systems, our much higher usage for university mentors and student teachers has had a few technology glitches - some user error. However, every problem was immediately taken care of and corrected by Sibme customer Service.