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PowerSchool Software Helps School Districts

Posted by pudge on from the hack-the-grades dept.

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.

4 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing new here, move along... by burnsy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Not Really News... by macbort · · Score: 4, Informative
    Like someone else said above, PowerSchool has been around for awhile - Apple just bought them up in 2001. I have been involved in the statewide implementation of PowerSchool in North Dakota since 2001 and have seen a lot of the side effects of the Apple buyout.
    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...

  3. Re:program by macbort · · Score: 4, Informative
    PowerSchool Student Information System (PSIS) acts in much the same way as Easy Grade Pro. A local database file is stored on the teacher's computer by the client program (called PowerGrade), but data is syncronized with a server every few minutes. The web component allows teachers to log in from another computer (at home for example), and lets them perform some simple tasks, such as entering grades. You are correct in saying that web data entry is clumsy - many of the features of the PowerGrade client, such as auto entry of grades, are not available in the web application. The administration functions as well as the student/parent login features are all available through a web brower.

    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.

  4. Re:Wow 10000!!! by 777333ddd · · Score: 3, Informative
    Actually according to the USGovt, 50% of all students in the US are in districts with under 10000 kids. And 90% of the districts have less than 10000 kids.

    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.