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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.
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}
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.
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...
The initial post was incorrect in saying it was "platform-independent, web-based". The client program for PSIS (PowerGrade) only works on Macintosh computers or Windows computers. The PowerSchool program that was completely web-based, PowerSchool Enterprise, was taken off the market late last year.
So this is a pretty big market.
To work with those super large districts (the ones with the other half of the kids) is orders of magnitude more difficult I'm sure due to the customizations you can expect them to require.
I never claimed to know something Apple doesn't, but I have been working with PowerSchool for almost 2 years, longer than Apple has owned PowerSchool. PowerSchool is not a new program.
What is mentioned under the technlogy section is partialy true. The school administration functions and parent/student function are all web-based. The teacher web app (arguably the most important part), however, is amost completely useless. A companion client program called PowerGrade is installed on the teacher's desktop computer. Almost everything the teacher does has to be done through PowerGrade - all a teacher can really do through the web app is look at a class roster and put in grades for assignments already created. Not very powerful.
Apple DID have a completely web-based PowerSchool application called PowerSchool Enterprise, but was canceled last year due to many issues. For one, performance was aweful, with the website inaccessable with more than five people logged in at one one. Second, the features of PSE were NOWHERE near the features present in PowerSchool Student Information System, the current system Apple is selling.
We really wanted the web-based program to work - it's what PowerSchool originally sold us and is what we bought into. Unfortunately, Apple has canceledany plans for improved versions of PowerSchool.
It is not Web Object based. It is 4D database with a web based interface.
I administer it in our district.
This is a reply to both you and the guy worried about "increasing the work for teachers".
:)
We have implemented PowerSchool in our school and I can tell you that it handles scheduling issues just fine. Our middle school uses a rotating A-B schedule with anywhere from 6-12 periods, including an advisory period that must always come first. Second, Powerschool allows you to create any grade scale you want and assign any numbers to them, thus you can create "My Blah School's Grade Scale" and use that when storing and calculating grades.
Issues of security: PowerSchool is actually written in 4D - a longtime Mac and PC based relational database program - and runs as a webserver for the "cross-platform" part of it. Permissions can be assigned to groups or users on a per page/per user basis. Teacher passwords are kept in clear text so the admins can see them, but admin passwords are encrypted. It supports SSL.
I only heard of one school where Powerschool could not do its schedule - becuase they had no defined pattern to their schedule. It changed on a daily basis based on room availability. It must also be mentioned that of all the schedule programs they looked at, NONE of them could do their schedule. PowerSchool came the closest.
Finally, in response to another poster who worried that PowerSchool would increase the workload of teachers, I must disagree. Teachers use a desktop application called Powergrade where they keep track of all assignments and tests and that are automatically backed up to the server. This is something that teacers have to do anyways - why not do it on a system that can automatically calculate their grades for them and restore from backup if necessary? From a teacher's perspective, powerschool does not ADD anything to their workload, but it does change how they input the information.
On to my own POV's:
Things I like: centralized data management - no more of this "so and so has the current address/phone for that parent".
Easy backups - Powerschool is a standalone application and all its data and documents reside neatly in one folder. Did your server blow up? Move the data folder to any Mac or NT server and start it up again.
Object reports - you can specify almost any box, line, field, simple calc, graphic, etc. you can imagine to create customized reports.
Things I don't like:
Object reports: Reports don't autoflow to the next page. If you want to go over a page, you must create a new page and clearly delineate where the first page of your report ends. This is *REALLY* annoying for report cards with teachers comments where you can't possible predict how long or short a teacher's comments will be. Result - either large blanks or cut-off comments.
Not OS X native - Boo! I know they are working on it, but one of the glitches is that Powerschool will sometimes quit from random memory errors in Mac OS 9. We're hoping the OS X version fixes this issue.
Other than that, anyone who is planning on implementing should be aware that its usually a full year before you are fully transitioned from your old system to Powerschool. Mostly because people are still gettin gused to the "new" way of doing things. Good planning is essential, followed closely by data integrity. After all, garbage in, garbage out.
Just my $.02
blue
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.