Gibbon is free, open source software: its flexible design gives schools complete control and freedom. Gibbon collates student information, helping teachers to understand, contact, find and help their students. It allows teachers to plan, teach, collect, assess and return work in one streamlined process. It is built by teachers, with the primary purpose of aiming to solve problems common to all schools.
Features:
Learn
Planner
Use Smart Blocks to cut your planning time in half (based on anecdotal evidence). Plan lessons using rich multimedia and share them with students and parents. Incorporate lessons into units and automatically aggregate details through Departments. Assign homework, collect student work online and then tie it to a Markbook for grading. Create outcomes and assign them to units, allowing for curriculum mapping. Invite participants to peer assess each others’ work through Crowd Assessment. Allow Guests to come in and view or take lessons. Take class attendance, and compare it to school attendance. Make notes on what worked and what can be improved. Students can like lessons, allowing teachers to earn gold stars and discover which lessons and popular and which are not.
Departments
Divide courses into Learning Areas and automatically bring lesson plans into a chronological scope and sequence for easy access by parents, students and staff. Add Learning Area overviews and other reading materials. Create departments for Administration, allowing supporting staff to share documents with all stakeholders.
Resources
Find, catalog and share resources within a single school-wide database. View resources as you find them, or insert resources directly into lesson plans, using HTML to create rich lesson plans. Organise resources using category, purpose, tags and year groups.
Timetable
Display individual timetables for any student or teacher. Quickly find where people are, and the phone number of the room they are in. Link to school and personal Google Calendars, and display as dynamic overlay to see all events in one place. Quickly use the Planner to create lesson plans for any class. Book rooms and other facilities, and view bookings right in your calendar.
Activities
Create a listing for a school activities program and allow students and parents to view and sign up online. Manage applications on first come, first serve basis or by manual selection. Generate attendees lists and print attendance registers for (great for off-site activities).
Individual Needs
Designate students with individual learning needs and create individual education plans. Archive plans as students develop, to see progress longitudinally. Integrates with the Planner and Students modules to give indicators and quick access to differentiation ideas.
Library
Catalog any item you wish you track or loan, be it a book, movie, computer or camera. Loan items to users, and control your inventory. Allow students to browse the library, and share their reading record with teachers.
People
Students
The Student Profile brings together information on individual students from across the system and makes it available to appropriate people in a single place. The Fast Student Finder on the homepage makes it incredibly quick for teachers to find students. Student listings throughout the system provide teachers with links back to the Student Profile for quick access to other important data. Academic, behavioural, medical and SEN alerts are generated from system-wide data, and presented for quick access to those who need to know.
Application Form
Use the Application Form to allow members of the public to apply for school places online. Manage a priority-based queue of applications, and accept or reject applicants at any time. Automatically create user accounts and family links for accepted students and their parents, including assignment of usernames and passwords.
Attendance
Take school attendance for form groups or individual students. Quickly see a student’s recent or full history to establish patterns of absence. Set future absences to make morning attendance faster. Generate school absence reports for emergency evacuation use. Allow parents to view attendance data, allowing closer monitoring for truancy.
Behaviour
Create notes outlining both positive and negative student behaviour. Describe behaviour with school generated descriptor and severity lists, along with individual comments and details of followup. View notes by form group or individual student. Form group tutors see summary of recent activity on their homepage. Students receive likes for positive behaviour, and can view when, why and by whom they were deemed meritorious.
Data Updater
Empower certain users (staff, parents) to update personal and medical data for members of their families, allowing schools to keep data updated without the need for paper forms. Update requests enter a queue for processing by an administrator, and can be amended by the creator at any time. Generate reports for flexible groups of students showing last update date, and use these in trip planning.
Staff
Advertise job openings, and accept applications against them. Take applicants and turn them into staff members, creating accounts automatically. Create a shared directory of staff, giving relevant users access to brief or full details. For example, allow parents to quickly contact staff based on email addresses, whilst allowing school administrators to view full personal details for HR and payroll. Input and track contract details. Use Data Updater to allow staff to keep their own details up to date.
Form Groups
See all form groups, tutors and tutees quickly, including where they are located. Easily jump from form group view to see the student profile of an individual tutee.
Assess
Markbook
Continuously record and report on academic data across all subjects and choose to make it available to the students and their parents. Empower teachers with longitudinal academic data across all subjects, available in a single view. Integrate with the Planner to quickly view and mark student work submissions. Upload responses to students in terms of marked work, rubrics or voice recordings.
Rubrics
Create interactive, clickable rubrics and track student progress over time. Use outcomes from the Planner, and start tracking performance across a cohort or the whole school.
Tracking
Take data from the Markbook and Formal Assessments modules, and graph it, individually or by cohort, to see student and school development over time. Quickly spot trends in how and when students learn. Export selected assessment data to a tracking spreadsheet to do further analysis offline.
Formal Assessment
Capture details of both Internal and External Assessments taken by students, and allow teachers to use the data to improve understanding of their students. Includes CATS tests by default, but other tests can be added with no programming required. Take the time to convert test scores to a school-wide scale, and the system will automatically calculate a value-added score for each student, based on data drawn from the Markbook.
Crowd Assessment
Allow student work to be shared to flexible sets of users, who can view, like and discuss the work. Use this to enable peer assessment or cast your net wider to a whole crowd. Students who have their work “liked” by others earn gold stars, which can be used as an incentive.
Other
Messenger
Quickly and easily send messages out to flexible groups of users drawn from other areas of the system, such as students and parents from a particular form group, teaching class or activity. Supported message formats include email, SMS and Message Wall. Use the message wall to produce an individualised, live daily bulletin of announcements. Include attachments in the form of links, files or HTML, drawn direct from the school wide resource bank.
Finance
Manage fees, billing schedules and invoicees, and use them to generate and email invoices, receipts and payment reminders. Track payments as they arrive, and generate lists of families who have outstanding payments. Manage expense requests, approval, payment and reimbursement.
Admin
School Admin
Control aspects of the school such as school years, year groups, form groups, houses, terms and school days.
System Admin
Control system settings, modules, themes and system updates.
User Admin
Administer users, families, student enrollment, medical data and data updates.
Timetable Admin
Input timetable data into a flexible framework for rendering and usage. Includes the ability to specify courses, classes and enrolment.
Try the demonstration: Demo