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.

Comments

It's about time!!

[rearl]

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.

Re:It's about time!!

[cornflux]

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.

Apple's ideal.

[corey18_70]

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.