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Education Businesses Apple

PowerSchool Software Helps School Districts 55

Posted by pudge 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.
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PowerSchool Software Helps School Districts More

PowerSchool Software Helps School Districts

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  • It's about time!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rearl ( 262579 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @09:35AM (#5535822)
    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!! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cornflux ( 168139 )
      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
      • I agree with everything you've said here. It is too bad that "the system" has ground her down to the point that she is unwilling to continue in it. I'm willing to bet that we lose many good teachers this way.
        • I think you'd get a hefty return on your bet.

          Just last month I heard a guy on radio, discussing some topic relating to education, mention that the best teachers usually quit or leave within their first few years.

          At the time I thought to myself "hhmm, maybe..." Only now do I fully realize how true this statement/claim was.

          I'm trying to place a source to this information, and I've found a couple that seem to confirm:

          http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/tm_printstory . cf m?slug=07voices.h11
          http://www.usatoda
    • My son attends a school which has been using PowerSchool. I love it. Instead of getting a report card every 6 weeks with a number of "surprises" on it (none of which my son can explain :-) ), I can monitor each class on a regular basis, allowing both of us to keep on top of things. Also, there is an email link for each teacher - making communication much easier for those of us who are more comfortable at a computer than on the phone. (Have you ever tried to conference with a deaf ASL teacher over the phone?
  • I seem to remember a big to-do about it a couple years back, but I may be mistaken ...

    -- shayborg

  • Wow 10000!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AntiGenX ( 589768 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @10:25AM (#5536111)
    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?

    • I think it is supposed to be a school of 10,000. At least that is the way they did it in my school district as I was leaving. Each school had its own Power School server. First the high schools rolled it out, and then the Junior Highs and Elementary Schools.

      It was nice to be able to see what my teacher had recorded for my grade without having to make an appointment, luckily though it was only a trial test while I was still in school so my parents never bothered with it. It would've gotten really old t

      • Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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 an

    • Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:3, Informative)

      by 777333ddd ( 525062 )
      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.

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

      'Cause Apple is selling it?

      I'm guessing that it is a WebObjects App/suite...
      • Yeah, in a 'dumbass' moment I kinda glazed over that "apple selling" part. I was too focused on the "platform-independent" part... my bad! :-)
    • My home town had 200 people (and change) in it when I was a senior in high school. In 2000 the census reported [epodunk.com] that 231 people lived there. My school district was composed of about 10 small towns in the area. The elementary school had 220 students while the high school and junior together had 200. My 6th grade class at the elementary school (two in the district at the time) I attended had 6 guys in it. One teacher taught to grades at the same time. My class actually had a Senior Trip in high school.
      • I understand that my school district doesn't *necissarily* compare to everyone elses. In fact the fellow who responded that most school districts are under 10000 people makes that point. Rural areas account for a far greater percentage of the U.S. than urban, however population density in these areas is far less. To me, this would explain the statistics in the followup post. I would assume that the majority of districts are smaller than my local one. In my county, the city and county schools were merged to
      • P.S. Sorry... I use mac and apple interchangibly. I use a lot of different platforms (including mac), but when I think of apple, I think of mac. The only pieces of apple software *I've* ever used outside of a mac are WebObjects on Solaris and Quicktime on a PC. Again, sorry for the confusion.

    • If it's platform independant, why is this in the mac section?


      It's in the Mac section because the PowerSchool Server only runs on a Mac.

      Last I heard, it isn't even a native OS X application. They might have changed that by now.

  • cool (Score:3, Funny)

    by bobba22 ( 566693 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @10:26AM (#5536117) Journal
    Everyone knows you don't really learn much of any value at school. Maybe they can extend this program further by modelling your first, lets say 10 years at school, attendance, results etc to predict how your life would pan out. If you would be of little value to society, then, I dunno, join the police or something similar. Sounds like a great idea ;-)
    • Great idea! I bet they could really sell that to China since they used to do similar things there. Too bad it doesn't scale past 10,000!

  • Nothing new here, move along... (Score:4, Informative)

    by burnsy ( 563104 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @10:44AM (#5536250)

    Powerschool was offering this functionality long before it was assimilated [macobserver.com] by Apple in 2001, and at $6-$10 per student per year, Apple is not helping anyone, there are selling software.

  • Time factor (Score:4, Interesting)

    by booble ( 638328 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @11:41AM (#5536641)
    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.

  • Not Really News... (Score:4, Informative)

    by macbort ( 224663 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @12:22PM (#5537007)
    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 [thinksecret.com] 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...

    • Really man?! Where you out of?

      Since, I'm only a student, all I have gotten to see is the user side. Thanks for switching to PSIS. The WebObject version just sucked, every week the thing would be down, not that it mattered, the teacher had no clue how to use it.

      "...although teachers are happier and performance is better..."

      thats an understatement.

      If you here in Bismarck, I would enjoy meeting you. No one to talk to about to about CS in this god forsaken city.

      BTW...thanks for closing off linuxconf and a
  • it doesn't clearly state on there website. but how does the teacher enter in data? does the teacher use an online version of it or what? i currently work at a school that uses easy grade pro to upload its data to edline.net . all the data is entered into the program and the teacher clicks on internet and pretty much the data is transfered. apple should use the same type of program for the data. web entered data is pretty clumsy looking. and i find it hard to do even though i do it myself on a daily basis. i

    • Re:program (Score:4, Informative)

      by macbort ( 224663 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @01:37PM (#5537638)
      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.

      • The initial post was incorrect in saying it was "platform-independent, web-based"

        I was quoting Apple. Please refer to the article [apple.com] for further research. It states:

        PowerSchool, a web-based student information system from Apple...And because PowerSchool is platform independent, it can be accessed from any Windows or Mac computer with a web browser and supports Windows and Mac server platforms.

        If there's something you know that Apple doesn't, we'd like to know. Looking under the Technology [apple.com] tab in the a

      • Re:program (Score:2, Informative)

        by macbort ( 224663 )
        If there's something you know that Apple doesn't, we'd like to know. Looking under the Technology [apple.com] tab in the article it sounds like they have a good web-based solution.

        I never claimed to know something Apple doesn't, but I have been working with PowerSchool for almost 2 years, longer than Apple has owned PowerSchool. PowerSchool is not a new program.

        What is mentioned under the technlogy [apple.com] section is partialy true. The school administration functions and parent/student function are all web-based

  • Think different? Or not? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zachlipton ( 448206 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @01:27PM (#5537551)
    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."
    • 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*
    • This is a reply to both you and the guy worried about "increasing the work for teachers".

      We have implemented PowerSchool in our school and I can tell you that it handles scheduling issues just fine. Our middle school uses a rotating A-B schedule with anywhere from 6-12 periods, including an advisory period that must always come first. Second, Powerschool allows you to create any grade scale you want and assign any numbers to them, thus you can create "My Blah School's Grade Scale" and use that when storing
  • 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.
  • I couldn't find if this was a Servlet implmenetation, PHP, Perl... interesting to see what they would be using.
    • WebObjects. More general info on the PowerSchool page here [apple.com].
      • Kinda funny (emphasis mine):

        Architecture and System Requirements

        Server: One Apple G4 or Windows 2000 server supports up to 10,000 students with a single database.
        I guess this is simply an acknowledgement of the kind of hardware most schools have. But I find it amusing anyway: how often does Apple release software for Windows computers? It's almost always been the other way (Office, etc.).

        • >I guess this is simply an acknowledgement of the > kind of hardware most schools have. But I find it > amusing anyway: how often does Apple release software > for Windows computers? It's almost always been the > other way (Office, etc.).

          Apple took OPENSTEP Enterprise and created WebObjects with that. It used to and I believe still runs on PPC and x86. Plus at one time they ran on NeXT boxes.

          This ability to run under Windows NT is a leftover from the NeXT days. Actually I think that th

      • Re:The Technology? (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It is not Web Object based. It is 4D database with a web based interface.

        I administer it in our district.

  • Apple's ideal. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by corey18_70 ( 304047 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2003 @05:05PM (#5539374)
    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.
  • I would be interested in seeing a sample apple developed site that gives the "best case scenario" I think the price of this program alone is a hard sell to poor rural schools. Many of them are still fighting to receive broadband. That being said, I would love to conform that: 1) My child is in school 2) My sons classes 3) Grades in those classes 4) How web savvy his teachers are. I would also like the ability to shoot them an email with a quick "Is my son doing well?", "Is my son acting up in your class?"
  • Those of you thinking powerschool is to expensive or requires a lot of work need to look at what we currently have to use to manage student data. The other programs are not platform independent. Many features are PC only and the software often very buggy and hard to use. SASI for example is a nightmare to manage and scales up to SQL very poorly. And every little featue is a so called Module that cost 15 to 30k a piece. Want web based attandence 15 grand, want web based grades 30 grand want the grade bo

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