PowerSchool SIS Reviews

PowerSchool is a great tool for both me and my child. It is easy to navigate and displays perfectly on mobile devices. I can access grades, assignments and GPA quickly and easily. It is a streamlined and modern format, buttons are accessible and the dashboard gives you all necessary information on one screen. The classes button nicely displays each class, grade and assignments associated with that class. I also love the new schedule feature.

Since this is the first software program we have used related to school information I don't have anything to compare it to. It hasn't presented any challenges for us yet.

Powerschool Pro bundles grades and attendance into one program. We can change our attendance up to midnight, which is a real benefit in this new Virtual environment. PowerSchool has built-in graphical seating chart (click and drag) that can be printed - amazing feature! We can do attendance from the seating charge grid - a huge timesaver!
When taking attendance, we can set the timeframe into the past, and get a great visual feel for students that have been missing excessive classes, for example.
Clicking on Student View, I can see all their demographic info in one place, or all their grades and attendance for all classes. So helpful when making that Parent Call to know if the child is struggling in all of his classes, or just having trouble in my class.
Gradebook is very robust - we are allowed to change the columns/view, for example, to accommodate the all the different screen sizes on our various devices we are using. Weighting grades is a click of a mouse, as are categories. Grades can be overridden, and re-calculated, at the click of a mouse.
A fantastic feature of PowerSchool Pro is the ability to see a summary screen for the entire class by grading period (instead of individual grades). I can instantly identify students who made or missed their semester goal by 1 or2 points, for example, and then look at all their report cards to date to see what happened. I can easily see "low" or "high" classes and adjust my teaching style.

PowerSchool (the website) goes down periodically for maintenance, and there is NO way for a "mere teacher" to find out when it will come back up! If you are a teacher, you CANNOT contact PowerSchool directly - you must go through your "representative" who is (for my campus) NEVER available.
Right now, yes, it is the holidays, but with NO NOTICE the program has been down for a week with NO IDEA of when it will ever come back up. I had made arrangements with some of my failing students over the Break, and so had other teachers. We are trying to find the student contact info and grade info that is all locked away in PowerSchool that we foolishly thought we would be able to access. With no luck. And we cannot even ASK when it might come back up. This happens regularly on Saturdays, Spring break - times when I am trying to catch up. I now keep my grades in an Excel spreadsheet so I can at least get at them. Teachers beware!
Another weakness currently is the Attendance Audit - for our District it only goes back 2 weeks. In High School, students lose credit after 4 absences / semester and it would be nice to be able to quickly see who those students are from a report.
Lastly, they have an Attendance feature that allows you to group separate classes into one session, but that feature is MISSING for grades. If your periods are coded as different Classes by your District, you will be forced to open, close, enter grades, repeat... over and over for each separate class.

Being able to view grades and teacher comments

The navigation labeling is confusing and misleading. What is the difference between "Grade History" and "Historical Grades"? They are two separate pages, but the distinction is not obvious to me. There is nothing shown on either one. "Grades and Attendance" only displays attendance, not grades. Finally found grades under "Standards Grades History" but had to scroll down to see it. The first thing shown is a schedule. This is not an expected information architecture.

The grades are laid out in a table with numbers, letters, and symbols indicating performance. You need to scoll up and down to see what they mean in the legend at the bottom of the page. There are 13 different symbols to have to refer to in the legend. You easily lose your place going back and forth to see what the symbol is supposed to indicate. I'd rather have it spelled out in the table instead of referring to a symbol. You could probably even put the legend in a floating div to the left or right of the grade table so it's easier to reference.

The usability of this site is poor. I needed help from others to find what I was looking for. The overall design is lackluster. Could use quite a few improvements to make this a better experience.

PowerSchool's gradebook system is pretty easy to use. The administrator can set grade weights if that is something that is standard across your school.

The main page for recording attendance, viewing student/parent contact information, viewing attendance report is not very intuitive. Once you know how to use it, it is fine. However, there are several different clicks you have to make to achieve what you want, and the first few times it is trial and error finding out how to get what you want.

PowerSchool SIS has been around for a long time. The software has eveloved with the needs of the schools and the parents. We have many districts in our state running this SIS and I don't think we could ever change. The SIS is easy to use as a teacher, student, parent, office personnel, and it is easy to support. There are many custom addons and other features PowerSchool can accomodate if not native to the plateform.

Somtimes we have diffuclut time reaching knowledgable support staff when we have issues.

Powerschool does come with a lot of features that let you integrate most of the tools you need to run a school. Nice interface.

Lack of integration with spreadsheets (which could make your work easier if you're in a hurry), and not that user friendly. Over complicated processes for lists, etc. I know other school softwares that are way easier to use.

The best part about the software is the ability for users to contact both students and parents in a timely manners. It is also much easier to contact groups of students if the need for this arises. Also, the building of and construction of classes is fairly easy to create.

When moving from student to student and the entering of grades, the saving option and instant updates to the grade structure lag a little. Must go through multiple steps in order to do this.

It saves a lot of time and is easy to use. It is very helpful to the Administrators and Teachers with all information for the students. Parents can view all information online for their child only and information from the school. Historical information is great.

There is nothing that i can think that i like the least at this time.

Parents can see their students' progress in almost real time. I get notifications whenever a teacher inputs a grade for my child, allowing me to have conversations with them about their learning on a regular basis and without having to wait for progress reports or report cards.

This does require teachers to input grades on a regular basis, and regrettably, not every teacher does. The software design, while effective, does feel a bit clunky. For example, if I get a notification about a grade change, it takes many. many seconds from my logging in to see that new grade pop up.

They listened to concerns and came out with updates to fix issues. Our administrators send out upgrade tutorials so we have the cutting edge knowledge. Once you use it regularly it becomes second nature.

Inability to run reports with specific field of information. Had to rely on administrators to update and create reports that weren't standard. No friendly user manual, used one created by our administrators.

We purchased PowerSchool in 2011 and have used it since. PowerSchool is a robust and user-friendly SIS.

PowerSchool bought it's self out a few year back. Since that time, I have not been on board with the business model. We are small district and PowerSchool is a premium product. Since the purchase, they have begun acquiring 3rd party vendors instead of updating their software. They pick one preferred vendor and that vendor has full access integration to PS but you pay top dollar for that integration. As small as we are, we cannot afford to add everyone of these integrations just to have a "better" system that we are already paying top dollar for! This is my biggest issue with PS at the moment.

This is a simple platform that I, as a teacher, use daily to communicate with faculty and students. I post messages, documents, videos, and various other files into individual classrooms I set up for my students. There they can find the syllabus and see how the class is broken up into units. They are alerted by email when changes or updates have been made.

For our school faculty page, it's a way for them to post commonly used materials and handbooks, college counseling information, deadlines. It's been an invaluable tool for keeping me organized. And I am NOT that tech savvy and I was able to use it immediately with almost no learning curve.

I feel like I learn about new features all the time. I wish there was a way to learn about them earlier or that they were more obvious in style. Overall, I have very little to say against this program.

PowerSchool Student Information System is so very easy to use. I love that it contains so many features. I can do health records, parent info, attendance, class rosters, student info, special education and testing info, and more can be found in this system for our students.

This may be on our school corporation's end, but it times out too quickly. When I am searching for students and information, I may be on PowerSchool for a period of time. If I don't click something within a short period of time, it logs me out and I have to log in again. Annoying, but this may be a time set by my employer and not a part of the PowerSchool Student system.

As a classroom teacher, I do find it convenient to have access through this software to important information about my students, such as emergency contact info, birthdays, attendance data.

I don’t feel like this is a super user-friendly software. I can navigate now easily to the features I use daily, but other than that, it takes me a lot of clicking to get where I need to go! Navigation could be a bit easier.

PowerSchool gives teachers like me a great deal of detail and data on our students. This can be your one stop shop for contact information, grades, standard performance, reading levels, and more for all of your students!

PowerSchool is not easy to navigate, and it often requires you to visit multiple pages to get all the information you need. If I wanted to see a specific data point on all my students, I have to visit all of their individual pages - or if there is another way to get to it, I haven't been able to figure it out yet. For all of the data points teachers are expected to keep track of, I wish this made it easier to quickly access and see what I needed.

Power School helps kept track of a child's attendance, grades and tardiness. It also allows the teacher and Administration to look up the demographics so that they know who the child's guardians are. And it also helps contact the parents encase there is a emergency.

The only issue I have had with Power School is the customer support at times. And that is usually a State wide issue.

I like that PowerSchool has the ability to search for students in many different ways, ie: last name, first name,. grade level, parent name, street address, etc. It is also convenient that you can look up family members who are also enrolled in the school district.

It can be very difficult to figure out how to run certain reports, and sometimes the fields that you use in the quick export function are not intuitive. The mobile app is not very user friendly, either.

Gradebook and SIS all in one place that allowed parents to interact and view live grades on a daily basis. Creating new profiles was easy... for students, not so much faculty.

The user interface was aged. It felt way older than it should have been. It also was a PAIN to set up new years, calendars, etc. If there is a warning when setting things up that says, "If you do this step wrong, you can kiss a weekend of your life goodbye fixing the problem," then something isn't right, in my opinion. The parent portal was nice, but again, not as user friendly as I think it could have been.

The interface is easy to use and understand, it is great for keeping student information in one place, as well as for keeping track of parent/guardian contact information together. They constantly are making improvements to their program.

The cost is expensive, and if you want the student management system and the class room systems each one is separate cost.

I like that I can find out information about my students in one place. It even has medical codes and information about students.

I don't really have any cons with this program. Once you figure out where everything is, it's super easy to use.

I like everything that i have used in powerschool. It is always more features being added.

Nothing that i can think about at this time.

Quick and easy to use, can create presets for assignments so you can quickly create assignments. And ability to copy assignments to other classes or create copies saves so much time.

gradebook setup can be confusing at first, because there is so much functionality with it. Once you understand the choices it is not hard though.

I can see real time updates on my child's progress. Teachers add assignments and grades daily and I don't have to wait until the next progress or report card to know how my child is doing.

Only the teachers that don't use it regularly. This is not a software issue though. It's a teacher issue.

I have no idea how complex the software is to configure and maintain, but as a parent of older students, it's invaluable to me. It gives me the chance to stay on top of what's happening academically so things don't get too out of hand before I ask or do anything .

It's not a con as much as a wish. The app has the kids' schedules already. It would be great if the class or teacher linked to the teacher website. At the start of the year, I always go through and bookmark everything that comes home, but those links inevitably get lost. Would be great to have them attached to the schedule.

I love the fact that Powerschool is so easy to use. I can toggle in and out and find/enter information with east

There really isn't anything that I would change about PowerSchool. Many of my complaints were addressed with the last update.