Top 5 Things Teachers Love About PowerSchool SIS

As an education tech director, how do you help teachers address current or changing classroom challenges like learning loss from COVID-19-caused school closures? At the same time, what can you do when teachers are overwhelmed with too many technology tools that operate in silos and fail to give them the consolidated insights that they need to impact student learning?

According to teachers we spoke with, the answers lie with the most critical classroom and district technology product: the student information system. At the center of your educational ecosystem, an effective SIS is even more important now as teachers are faced with the potential of students having lost three months to a full year of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a 2021 study by McKinsey & Company on COVID-19 and its impact on learning loss and achievement gaps.

We reached out to teachers to find out how PowerSchool SIS, K-12’S industry-leading student information system, is helping in their classrooms. What we found out is that there are multiple reasons teachers use, depend on, and love PowerSchool SIS. For technology leaders, having teacher buy-in on the district’s SIS is a high priority and impacts long-term product adoption and ROI.

Here are the top 5 things that teachers love most about PowerSchool SIS.

1. PowerSchool SIS Helps Improve Instruction

Providing the right technology for instructional improvement is needed to maximize time spent in the classroom, allowing teachers to do what they are most passionate about: teaching and connecting with students. PowerSchool is the only K-12 education platform designed to empower teachers with tools to promote student success in one integrated classroom experience. The embedded PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook empowers teachers with real-time insights into student progress and other critical demographic data that helps them target growth areas. 

“PowerSchool allows us to better drill into student learning,“ explains Allison Lair, Language Arts/Curriculum Director at Iowa’s New London Community School District. “Because of PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook visual graphs, and because our ‘I can‘ statements are so specific, we’re able to identify areas where students are struggling and spend more time and focused education on that. And we can also quickly and easily see what students are mastering, so we don’t spend unnecessary time on those. PowerSchool SIS really helps us improve our instruction.“

“By having access to class trends and specific student strengths and weaknesses, I can more accurately plan for the needs of my students and focus more on those areas where my students are struggling,“ says Tom Miller, a 6th Grade Teacher at Massachusetts’ Harrington Elementary School.

2. PowerSchool SIS Connects with Other Critical Integrated Classroom Tools, like Schoology Learning 

Having your core systems connected within an interoperable framework can give teachers more comprehensive student data showing the whole child and an improved and more efficient user experience. PowerSchool SIS is an open platform with over 75 independent software partner products offering deep integration, SSO, and bidirectional data exchange via the PowerSchool API.

Plus, PowerSchool SIS offers deep integration with PowerSchool Schoology Learning, giving teachers one platform for integrated classroom management. This integration eliminates duplicate data entry, improves attendance taking, and enhances personalized instruction with easy access to both academic and non-academic student data.

“The fact that PowerSchool has data integrated with the SIS and Schoology saves me time in data and assessment work,“ says Sean Coffron, Instructional Technology Training Specialist at Virginia’s Manassas City Public School.

3. PowerSchool SIS Improves Efficiency and Saves Time

Technology should make a teacher’s job easier and allow them to get more done. Tech should help teachers spend less time on administration and more time on education.

“By having tools like the standards report in (PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook,) which was taking me 20 minutes in the school day to complete before, now I can spend that 20 minutes on getting student feedback to help inform instruction, or creating assessments, or something else that affects student learning,“ says Lair.

Ron Strate, of Alberta’s Westwind School Division, says, “PowerSchool SIS gives us the access as teachers to get valuable information on our students and classes in a short time. We would be wasting lots of time if it wasn’t for this program.“

“As a teacher, I’ve found firsthand how PowerSchool SIS has helped me teach more and work less through the gradebook,“ says Matthew Davis, Teacher and Tech Coordinator at Pennsylvania’s Baden Academy Charter School. “Now, I don’t have to go through and manually score in a paper copy book, then go through at the end of the quarter and average the scores. All I have to do is create an assignment, which takes two seconds, grade the scores, and it automatically averages everything. That has helped save a lot of time and create efficiency that I really enjoy as a teacher in the classroom.“

“PowerSchool gives the teachers the ability to simply do what they need to, and that’s to teach students,“ says Lisa Arnett, principal and former teacher at California’s Valley Christian Junior High. “They don’t have to stop class to handle administrative, time-consuming tasks. Instead of all of the housekeeping calls and duties that can eat into lesson time, now teachers can spend their time teaching.“

4. PowerSchool SIS Offers Flexibility 

PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook is optimized for both standards-based and traditional grading, so there’s never a struggle to align grading methods. “Teachers can save many hours because they no longer have to calculate their standards by hand. The gradebook does many of their calculations that took hours in the past,“ says Denise Schlorff, Coordinator of Information Technology at Pennsylvania’s Hatboro-Horsham School District.

“Teachers enter the grade one time, and that’s it. There’s no copying that grade to any other system once that’s done,“ says Roger Sprik, Information Technology Director at California’s Valley Christian Schools. “We are saving time and gaining flexibility in reporting GPAs, and realizing greater functionality on things like creating transcripts and scheduling … There’s a lot of freedom for the teacher to work out the way they want to do their grading. Some teachers might want to do total points, and some might want to do weighted categories. PowerSchool gives teachers the freedom to allow them to choose their preferred grading practices.“

Some student information systems limit users to pre-loaded functionality with a lack of flexibility. However, the PowerSchool SIS offers teachers a custom comment bank, the ability to modify grade scale items, flexible grading options, and more.

5. PowerSchool SIS Improves Parent Engagement and Drives Student Growth

Involved parents can help their students through challenges, and students end up taking more responsibility for their learning. Engagement can also strengthen the parent-student relationship: knowing a student’s grades and assignments is an easy starting point to open dialogue for discussing progress, offering advice, working on projects together, or giving congratulations.

PowerSchool helps inform and engage parents through real-time student performance updates and convenient communication tools. The online parent portal and the mobile app give parents anytime, anywhere access to 360-degree views of their student’s performance.

“Families can access their student’s information quickly and easily anytime they want. PowerSchool SIS provides a centralized location for parents to understand how their student is performing in class,” says Robert Bourgeois, a teacher at North Carolina’s Durham School of the Arts.

“PowerSchool has really helped with parent engagement because the parents now have the mobile app where they can see, ‘hey, my student is getting an A right now,‘ or ‘hey, he’s getting a C, but he’s getting a C because he’s missed three assignments,‘” explains Matthew Davis. “From a teacher aspect, we’re looking at this because now the parents are contacting us right away, and we’re not always having to be the first to contact them and let them know their student is falling behind. Parents are really engaged with their students’ learning and really on top of how they’re doing academically in the classroom.“

“PowerSchool and PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook are good tools for parents to have easy access to their child’s grades and missing work. Parents are able to get many questions regarding grades answered through checking PowerSchool, which saves us time in terms of parent communication. It benefits students by giving them ownership over keeping track of their grades and work turned in,“ says Claire Hackett, Middle School Teacher (and parent) at California’s San Lorenzo Valley Unified School District.

“Everything is on the parent portal, and parents have an accurate picture of their children’s academic performance. There is no better way to communicate with a parent than with specifics, such as their current progress, standard average grade, and comparison between quarters. PowerSchool provides this information quickly, so there are no excuses. We are able to provide parents with up-to-date data and progress at the click of a button,“ says Yvonne Knott, Executive Assistant for Information Management at New York’s Massapequa Public Schools.

While the above ways are the top 5 things teachers love about PowerSchool SIS, there are a host of other benefits that come from having a secure, reliable SIS at the center of your tech ecosystem. From having clean, accurate data to the accessibility of an always-available system, PowerSchool SIS is providing comprehensive data to help teachers deal with today’s challenges, like learning loss and hybrid scheduling and attendance.