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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. Wow 10000!!! by AntiGenX · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I don't know about your local school districts, but I live in a medium-small sized town and 10,000 students in a district is on the small side. Give me something that can handle each school as a module and update to a County based repository and I'd be impressed.

    PS -> If it's platform independant, why is this in the mac section?

  2. Time factor by booble · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Think different? Or not? by zachlipton · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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."

    1. Re:Think different? Or not? by BigBir3d · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Apple only makes money if they can satisfy most customers, most of the time. Catering to the needs of a few, all the time, is bad business.

      The funny thing is, they only realise this for the services they provide (that they bought from somewhere else) and not the hardware that they provide (PPC).

      *shrug*