Today I had a chance to touch base with the director of technology at our school. And we talked about the Canvas and Haiku demos. And now I see why so many schools are turning to Haiku…
Haiku is really geared towards the K-12 market, whereas Canvas is targeting the University level, at the moment. So when it comes to being parent friendly and integrating well with some of the other databases at our school (attendance, grades), Haiku has a definite advantage. Also, as far as pricing goes, even if we were to purchase the highest end of offerings that Haiku has, we still would be saving money going with Haiku. The experience they have and the reputation they currently have is also huge. They have been fast to respond to any of the questions that we have. The flexibility to customize your page layout in Haiku is something I forgot to mention in my previous post. The look of Haiku is very different from Canvas, but this ability to customize the lookout of your page in Haiku is nice – especially for the lower/middle school.
Both Haiku and Canvas are working on adding features. So perhaps some of the features I love so much about Canvas will be integrated into Haiku in the near future!
I looked at quite a few LMS and these were my two clear favorites. They have their pros and cons, but all-in-all, I will be very excited using either of these two systems next year.
techieMusings 
I’ve been looking at both of these as an option for our district as well and IMO Canvas seems to be the best choice even though they are not as big in K-12. They are more expensive and this may be an issue, perhaps they will come-up with a more competitive K-12 pricing structure. I think either system would be an environment which will support good learning, and the teacher will make more of a difference than the choice between the two.
Here is a URL to a Google Spreadsheet I’ve made comparing our top 3 LMS Pros & Cons.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AulCCxhcWFt_dDl5WW9URExaY1pib2ZlcGZ5OXdhelE&hl=en_US
If I missed anything, let me know. Keep me up to date with your progress on this. Thanks for sharing and your BLC blog updates!!
Thank you so much for this! The spreadsheet is really helpful and I passed it on to the ‘decision makers’ :) I agree, it’s more about what the teacher does with it. Unfortunately, most of the great features go unused by most… I’m glad you enjoyed the BLC notes. It’s a great conference!
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