PowerSchool SIS

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.