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PowerSchool Software Helps School Districts
nycroft writes "Apple is helping school districts help teachers with PowerSchool, a platform-independent, web-based, student information system. PowerSchool enables teachers and administrators in school districts of up to 10,000 students to produce schedules and reports in minutes, and to generate attendance records, grade checks, report cards, transcripts, and form letters in just a few clicks. And all in real-time." It also allows such real-time access by parents to their kids' grades; I am so glad this wasn't around when I was a kid.
While I'd love to be able to check on my kids' progress (our school's ability to communicate with parents leaves MUCH to be desired), I like this for another reason.
Teachers today have to do way to much with way too few tools for way too little pay. Hopefully, schools/districts will take advantage of this to make teachers' lives easier.
when i went to a middle school that had a system like that the teacher randomly selected someone to run the computer that day and do all the work in it because he didnt want to... privacy privacy privacy...
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
I seem to remember a big to-do about it a couple years back, but I may be mistaken ...
-- shayborg
PS -> If it's platform independant, why is this in the mac section?
Everyone knows you don't really learn much of any value at school. Maybe they can extend this program further by modelling your first, lets say 10 years at school, attendance, results etc to predict how your life would pan out. If you would be of little value to society, then, I dunno, join the police or something similar. Sounds like a great idea ;-)
Powerschool was offering this functionality long before it was assimilated by Apple in 2001, and at $6-$10 per student per year, Apple is not helping anyone, there are selling software.
Having a dad that is in a district examining changing their school management system, I've gotten an inside view of the drawbacks to these types of systems. Number one being the time factor involved. He has little enough time to teach as it is. Now everyone is wanting to add having to do realtime updates of attendence and grades. Add to this alowing parents to contact him at all times during the day drawing time away from instruction and preperation time. Another factor to the increased time involved is whether there is to be any additional compensation. Programs such as these are sold on being a great panacea for freeing up trachers from mundane records work when in a real world analysis, it adds greatly to the burden. Unless that is your district pops for a person to do nothing but data management. I know that won't happen here in Nebraska anytime soon as many districts are having to plan for firing teachers to cut budgets due to financing problems.
Think Secret has also detailed a lot of the fallout.
We (ND) were originally using the brand new in 2001 (and beta quality) PowerSchool Enterprise (PSE), a completely web-based application that used WebObjects on the backend. This application was intended to serve very large districts and small states like ours. Although Apple/PowerSchool put most of their resources into PSE instead of the well established PowerSchool Student Information System (PSIS), the smaller scale client-server application, they continually failed to make deadlines, fix known problems, and even deliver features and performance comparable to PSIS. Problems eventually got so bad that Apple scrapped the PowerSchool Enterprise product and now has just the PSIS product, intended for smaller school districts. North Dakota is now using PSIS, and although teachers are happier and performance is better, you can imagine the cost involved at the state level with a server for each school and at the school level in having to support a desktop client application. At least we have a working product now...
it doesn't clearly state on there website. but how does the teacher enter in data? does the teacher use an online version of it or what? i currently work at a school that uses easy grade pro to upload its data to edline.net . all the data is entered into the program and the teacher clicks on internet and pretty much the data is transfered. apple should use the same type of program for the data. web entered data is pretty clumsy looking. and i find it hard to do even though i do it myself on a daily basis. i am pretty sure that powerschool does this, but edline allows the student to log in and check his/her grades. allows the parents to check there kids grades. and the teacher to post homework and more onto the website. this is a great progarm and find that more than half of the school uses it. i just don' tknow abuot this powerschool stuff.
I've talked to a couple teachers about PowerSchool because I was curious about it (I'm a student). The general conclusion was that PowerSchool is great for "normal" schools where there's 7 periods (or whatever) in a day and the normal set of letter grades are used. For schools with more "different" methods, but still a need to track information (e.g. narrative reports instead of grades, etc...), PowerSchool just can't handle it.
While I love and use Apple's products, I would expect something better from a company challenging us to "Think Different."
This is a product designed to make school administrators job's easier. It makes teachers do twice as much work. The Powergrade program, which is the program for actually inputing grades (only runs on mac and windows) is buggier then 99% of shareware programs. This is product that costs $25K not to mention 5k a year for support. Most teachers are keeping paper backups and end up doing twice as much work.
I couldn't find if this was a Servlet implmenetation, PHP, Perl... interesting to see what they would be using.
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Free your mind.
oh yeah oh yeah.
They are SHIT
I saw Apple's presentation on PowerSchool at the big technology-in-education convention in Chicago last summer. Their presentation showed a very mature and highly functional solution, though obviously what they presented was a best case scenario. Ideally, each teacher using the system would have a workstation at their desk, and everything would be web enabled. They would take attendance via the software in the morning from a list that would reflect things like students out sick that day, and submit the attendance roll.
Apple also claimed to offer hosting in an Apple datacenter of the PowerSchool application and data, to remove that burden from school districts. They claimed that "you should see our server rooms light up at five after eight" when parents are supposedly checking the just-posted attendance logs for that day.
There were a lot of other features that seemed useful, however most of it depends on how much the teacher wants to use the system: posting all the homework daily so parents know what their kids should be doing that night; checking off and posting whether that homework was completed on a daily basis.
Pretty powerful stuff, yet all dependant upon whether the schools can bear the cost, and how much time the teacher will commit to using the system. I can't vouch for how much of it actually "works" if a teacher is committed to using it as I haven't seen it in action.
I would be interested in seeing a sample apple developed site that gives the "best case scenario" I think the price of this program alone is a hard sell to poor rural schools. Many of them are still fighting to receive broadband. That being said, I would love to conform that: 1) My child is in school 2) My sons classes 3) Grades in those classes 4) How web savvy his teachers are. I would also like the ability to shoot them an email with a quick "Is my son doing well?", "Is my son acting up in your class?" etc. For a teacher, this does add another level to their daily environment, but if used as a tool, it could work well...
I'm the CS teacher for a high school that started using Powerschool/Powergrade this year. For anyone who is reasonably comfortable with computers, it has a lot of potential. If you keep a gradebook and take attendance, I don't see how this would add time to your day. It WILL make it more likely that parents will contact you since they can see the student's grades right away, but any teacher who sees that as a bad thing is in the wrong profession.
Unfortunately, as an earlier poster noted, Powergrade is VERY buggy. I've lost data more than once, the built-in backup functionality is prone to saving corrupted files, and several of the features touted in the manual haven't yet been implemented. Interestingly, the Mac version of the software is much worse than the windows version.
Those of you thinking powerschool is to expensive or requires a lot of work need to look at what we currently have to use to manage student data. The other programs are not platform independent. Many features are PC only and the software often very buggy and hard to use. SASI for example is a nightmare to manage and scales up to SQL very poorly. And every little featue is a so called Module that cost 15 to 30k a piece. Want web based attandence 15 grand, want web based grades 30 grand want the grade book software for the teacher workstations $100.00 a seat.
Powerschool offers alot. It is truly platform independent. Though there is a gradebook programs all that work can be done on a web site its just not as quick. 5-6 bucks per student is not bad when you look at what we pay in liscensing to other software manufacturers for student systems. If I could get support for student stystems for less than $6,000 a year it would be a huge cost savings.
And Powerschool is based on web objects. Web objects can scale up quite easily.