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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.

5 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. It's about time!! by rearl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:It's about time!! by cornflux · · Score: 2, Insightful

      On the flip side, my wife (a 6th grade teacher), would love to have all of her parents keep real-time tabs on the progress and coursework of their children... but, a large number of those parents just don't seem to care much to even do it on a weekly basis.

      And, it's not for lack of communication or trying on my wife's part. She writes a weekly email newsletter and maintains a regularly updated class website. Of course, that's in addition to the requisite open-house and conferences...

      You can have all of the neatest, latest, greatest tools at your disposal... but unless the parents take responsibility and interest, it's all for naught.

      I'll tell you what would really make a difference for my wife (to improve quality of education, not just her "social" or "home" life): more time for teaching and less everything else. Less administrative B.S., less committee B.S., etc. I know a lot of us can say something similar, but I'm telling you it's bad! Hearing about her day is like watching Office Space while at the same time reading Dilbert!

      All of that ancillary stuff is killing her. We're both tired of her 10-hour days... and, it's all leading us to the decision that she very likely won't be teaching next school year.

      While she's sad about not continuing teaching in public schools, she's very excited about home-schooling our own children.

      However, I can't help but feel sad for the students she would have had over the next N years... she's one of the best teachers, ever. It's her God-given talent.

  2. This product doesn't really help teachers. by mindKMST · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

  3. Apple's ideal. by corey18_70 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Wow 10000!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The quicktime demo i just watched at apple.com clearly touts the single-server-at-district-office as a big feature, though I'm sure if a district had many big schools they could do one at each school. Apple also says they'll host the whole thing for you (making them an ASP), but that costs per-student-per-year whereas buying the whole package is a one time fee.

    I'm really curious about the security implications of this system. If Joe Elementary Hacker (and yes he is out there) can mark his enemies absent and lower their grades, I'd say that might be a problem. I haven't found what the thing is written in yet, but I bet it's WebObjects. I know very little about WebObjects' applications' security history, but I think it's mostly proprietary stuff that never gets audited so the bugs just don't get found. If thats the case, schoolage hackers are going to love this system...