The Academy of the Holy Angels is a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence and a National Service Learning-Leader School that this fall rolled Haiku LMS out to its 1,200 students and parents.

Established in 1879 and sponsored by the School Sisters of Notre Dame, the Academy of the Holy Angels is the oldest private girls’ school in Bergen County, New Jersey. Today the school’s principal, Jennifer Moran, continues the tradition of excellence through its many programs and opportunities, including adopting and adapting new technologies.

The school has been intrigued by possibilities that tablet computers offer education, and in 2006 the academy became an all-tablet school. “We find that the tablets give students more options for classes like math [and] science,” said Mare Chitko,Technology Integration Coordinator for the school.

Why the Academy of the Holy Angels chose Haiku LMS

We need to know what’s important to our community — long-time and new participants — so we checked in with Ms. Chitko to find out how the school is responding to Haiku LMS and whether it’s living up to expectations.

The Academy of the Holy Angels chose Haiku LMS because “it seemed to us gloriously user friendly and visually attractive,” said Ms. Chitko. The school was impressed with the functionality and service provided during the free trial period as well, Ms. Chitko noted: “you let us fully run and I mean run—with all our kids and teachers, full schedule—for 3 months as a trial. No [money] and lots of assistance. We figured if we got that much interaction and attention in a trial, we had to do it for real.”

The response by teachers, students, and parents has been positive. A number of features and functionalities won users over because of their immediate application or obvious potential:

• Drag & drop layout – easily design your page “in 15 seconds”
• Email an entire class roster – contact an entire set of students in one fell swoop
• Daily updates – receive email reminders about due dates
• Discussion board – hold online conversations for topics like test preparation

The Haiku team is happy to hear that early adoption of our LMS has gone well, and we’ll continue to work with the Academy of the Holy Angels (and all the entire Haiku community) as they extend their classrooms and continue to innovate.