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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.

6 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.

  2. Re:not the best idea by Mononoke · · Score: 5, Funny
    my highschool had suh poar security on teachers computers not to mention the hole network. nothing like letting the kids play with their grades or poking fun at others.
    And now we know how you ended up with a diploma.

    --
    NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
  3. 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?

  4. 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.

  5. 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...

  6. 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.