PowerSchool SIS Reviews

Pros

One of the best reasons to use PowerSchool is that this software is all encompassing for the school district. We use this software for attendance, grades, teacher grade book, reports, state reporting, and even to manage our lunch program and student fees.

PowerSchool keeps parents and students informed. Parents (and students) have real-time access to their student's information which includes but is not limited to attendance, grades, and lunch balances.

Cons

In the "Old" days, Pearson used to download the state reporting updates automatically overnight for us. Now, I have to go to the PowerSource site to get the download and install the updates myself, which is time consuming and causes me to take PowerSchool offline during the work day.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Being able to view grades and teacher comments

Cons

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.

Pros

The capabilities and information that is available at your fingertips is extremely helpful. Very easy to pre-enroll and enroll students. We have account creation automated through PowerSchool, so when a student is enrolled, within 24 hours their school accounts are created, such as Active Directory, email, etc. This is very handy for our department.

Some of the features available in PowerSchool are: information management, reporting, IEP tracking , admissions management, billing and payment, student information management, student portal, parent portal, registration and scheduling, gradebooks and transcripts to name a few. Having everything in one place has been convenient for our staff and students.

Cons

There are so many bells and whistles, sometimes it is hard to figure out how to complete a task. However their help menu is very helpful. We also have the privilege of having our ISD available for help.

Pros

Here are the pros I see with PowerSchool as an administrator:
- Easy-to-use for newcomers
- Tons of potential and features
- They really do have incredible customer support. They offer a site where you can make suggestions, and upvote other ideas. They do release those features commonly, too.
- It's a one-stop-shop for almost every SIS need

Cons

Due to some major recent updates with the platform (specifically gradebook becoming web-based, called PowerTeacher Pro), I do not have any major complaints regarding it. I cannot speak to the programming side, but in my role as a troubleshooter for teachers, I find it very easy to use. I have noticed and heard that it doesn't always react/respond well across different OS. Due to the fact that it is web-based, this could be problematic if the internet was down.

Pros

What's really amazing about this software is how it manages to send hundreds of staff members input (grades, attendance, comments) to thousands of students and parents phones, laptops, tablets ect. seamlessly and easily, with plenty of extra essential features such as scheduling, and sign-ups, and substitute teacher logins, usually withourt any hiccups.

Cons

The android application is absolutely dreadful. Announcements rarely display properly and the menu is just a list of text. The app looks awful and many students report frequent crashing. The iOS app is only a slight improvement over the android version with a better GUI and less crashes. Both apps are missing a refresh feature (pull-down) and have no way of checking that the information displayed is current, often only updating a few minutes after the app is opened, causing the wrong days announcements to be displayed, and some students miss crucial information.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

PowerSchool SIS has been an easy and intuitive tool for us to manage different types of data and records securely and seamlessly. It is an all-in-one tool for data management and is very fundamental for the functioning of our school. Its wide range of features including attendance, customizability, easy user interface, different student and parent platforms, enhanced parental control, remote mobile application, grading, fees management, and a lot more has helped us in keeping paperless records and reducing work. Lastly, it has various integration options i.e. PowerPack, PowerSchool Ecollect forms, PowerSchool enrollment that we use in our institute to save time as well as resources.

Cons

Theirs nothing much that I dislike about PowerSchool SIS. Although, the user interface can be improved as use of more modern elements would give a better look and it would be easier to navigate. Rest everything is perfect.

Pros

What I like best about Powerschool is that all of the information that is pertinent to my job is housed in one location that I can easily access from any location; this being even more important working remotely during the quarantine. I could access everything I needed from student information to professional training and resources. No clicking in and out of program is necessary .

Cons

The only frustrating aspect of Powerschool seemed to be the timing of the updates. They always seemed to coincide with interim and the end of a grading period time frame not allowing for last minute adjustments to be made on students progress when assignments are submitted late or last minute.

Pros

PowerSchool is Integrated with our discipline module - Educator's Handbook - so we can upload the discipline into PS. I like the "set all" function for inputting attendance.

Cons

Not integrated with Ident-aKid for NC
Cannot "set all" when putting in comments in the attendance bubble
I wish teachers could see the student attendance for the other classes. That way they would know whether or not if the student has skipped.
There needs to be a better alert system for custody matters. (highlighted page, beep, etc)
I wish there was a warning when we don't submit a page before leaving the page.

Pros

I like Powerschool Student portal. It is a great tool for both parents and students to keep track of student grading information. All the information for all classes and teachers are in one convenient location.

Cons

Powerschool has a lot of information and can be overwhelming to a new parent or student. More tutorials should be available for beginners.

Pros

The product works well - we have been using it for decades. As with most software, greater flexibility and power means more options, and a greater need for training.

Cons

The tie-in with Enrollment could be better - the process for migrating user data is obtuse, and the year-to-year rollover is not as seamless as it should be. There is usually some cleanup that must be done - features turned back on, accounts reactivated, etc - that takes time to sort out.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

The ability to customize the SIS product with PowerSchool and third party vendors is a nice feature. It's ability to integrate with other education products is also a strength.

Cons

The training we received was very minimal. Our district felt like there was a lot left up to us to figure out after completing the trainings that were included with the implementation process. There are a lot of unknown costs that come along with the base product. Our district has had to purchase many additional training hours and third party plugins to customize the product to fit our needs.

Pros

I love that it’s easy to navigate, even with voice app for visual impaired parents that find it almost impossible to follow along

Cons

It does seem to sign out often even when it’s set never to Sign out or require password for the same device

Pros

I like that I have immediate access to my child's attendance down to the minute. I receive my child's attendance immediately, so that I can call her whenever she's marked absent. Teacher mistakes can be corrected immediately. Additionally, I am able to track her grades and assignments whenever and wherever I'm at. I use this program more than any other program on my phone.

Pros

Tons of features, love that everything is stored in one location. Like the ability to create and save SQl4 reports.

Cons

Sometimes clunky with many screens to navigate. Wish I could have a favorite button for most commonly used features instead of navigating to them each time.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

This software is easy to use and learn without being taught. Overtime, you can learn the shortcuts and that helps a lot.

Cons

I do not like that it logs us off so quickly if it is not being used but we can probably set the time to a longer stretch, but for security reasons, we don't.

Pros

I love that I can access my cchildrens grades and assignments anytime I want. I can see what class they are in also.

Cons

The grades are seldom up to date so some assignments are shown not graded when they actually are.

Pros

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 .

Cons

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.

Pros

Having easy access to all grades and assignments and being able to access it on my phone when grading anywhere.

Cons

Switching to online changed some of the screen sizes and took away assignment averages feature. Thankfully they have begun fixing much of that.