One of the newer features to be introduced to PowerTeacher Grade Book is Notifications, which will alert a teacher to students who have an upcoming birthday, students who have dropped a class, or students who have been enrolled into a class.

Notifications will also alert teachers to any time an administrator has opened their grade book. (Administrators are able to open a teacher's grade book in read only mode only - they cannot make any changes to the teacher's assignments, scores, or grading setups).

When you open your grade book, there is a notification icon at the upper right corner. If there are any recent notifications, the icon will indicate the number of notifications waiting for the teacher to view.

Clicking the icon will open and display the notifications window. Along the left-hand edge of the window, you can select the types of the notifications to display. You can also indicate whether to display notifications only for your currently selected class, or for all your classes.

This video will show how to run PowerSchool's built-in Section Readiness Report.

Click read more below to load the video.

This short video will demonstrate how to document in PowerSchool student visits to the nurse's office, when the nurse is not at your school.

For the best viewing experience, please click the four arrows at the bottom right corner of the video window. You can also adjust the video quality to 720p for High Definition.

Click read more below to load the video.

Whether exporting data from PowerSchool to be imported into another software program, or generating the ITBS/ITED Bar Code Extract, we need to associate a specific teacher with each student.

Depending on each specific purpose, the teacher may or may not actually be the students' home room teacher.

That is why, in the Muscatine Community School District, we require data to be kept in two fields:

1. home_room - The actual, current, home room teacher. Used for easily exporting to other programs.
2. IA_ClassTeacherName - The teacher name that is included in the ITBS/ITED Bar Code Extract for ITBS/ITED labels. (At some of our schools, the student's Advisor is the preferable name to use).

There are multiple ways of populating these two fields, including manually typing in the correct values on a per student basis, selecting groups of students and setting the value with the Student Field Value group function, or by importing the data. Each of these methods have drawbacks - namely, the amount of effort and length of time involved in setting accurate, consistent values.

In addition, it is sometimes easy to forget to update these two fields after transferring a student from a different school. If not properly maintained, schools may wind up with several student records with the name of a teacher from their previous school.

That is why I've created a custom page for PowerSchool that greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to set these values, and helps to ensure accurate, consistent data has been recorded.

Click the 'read more' link below for additional information.

Overlapping course enrollment records occur when a specific course.section has been added to a student's schedule more than once, and the date ranges between these multiple enrollment records overlap, or intersect one another.

Course enrollment records in this condition cause system instability, and it is ALWAYS wrong.

Please consider the following scenarios, and use them as a guide to determine how to fix this issue.

SCENARIO 1
Although the student currently has multiple enrollment records for the same class.section, in reality, the student has been attending this course all along. (The student did not leave this course, attend a different class during this term/period, and then return to this course.) In this case, there really is no reason to have multiple enrollment records, so they can be merged.

SCENARIO 2
There really was a break in the student's enrollment in this course.section. (The student left this course, attended a different class for a period of time, and then returned to this course.) Therefore, it is appropriate to have multiple enrollment records - the dates of entry and/or exit need only be modified so they no longer overlap one another.

IF SCENARIO 1...
After selecting the student, view the 'All Enrollments' page. At the bottom of this page, you will see an error message, along with a link. Click the link to invoke a special function to merge course enrollment records.

You will see the course.section in question, and then all the enrollment records. Looking at the Enter and Exit Dates, select the enrollment record that most closely reflects the student's actual enrollment into the course. Note that PowerSchool also shows the number of attendance records that are attached to each enrollment record. Click the 'Next Step' button.

If both course enrollments have attendance records attached to them for the same day, this page will display each attendance code, and allows you to choose which attendance code we should keep. You should always select the attendance code that is in bold, italicized text. Check the box to confirm that you really want to merge this group of enrollments, then click the 'Submit' button. (If you do not see attendance codes for you to choose from, you must still check the box to confirm that you really want to merge this group of enrollments, then click the 'Submit' button.)

IF SCENARIO 2...
After selecting the student, view the 'All Enrollments' page. Locate the multiple enrollment records for the course.section in question, and note their enter and exit dates. Click the 'Edit' link for the appropriate enrollment record(s).

Modify the enter and exit dates to reflect the student's actual attendance in the course. Remember, the goal is to ensure that the date ranges for the separate enrollment records do not overlap one another.

http://goo.gl/1WkmU

This article describes how a substitute teacher can take attendance for your class using PowerTeacher, without the need for your username or password.

1. Log into the Substitute Portal of PowerSchool:
   https://powerschool.muscatineschools.org/subs

2. Select the school and teacher that the substitute is filling in for from the drop-down fields, and enter the substitute password, attained from the front office.
   

3. Click the "chair" icon next to the class for which you need to take attendance.
   

4. Select the appropriate attendance code from the drop-down field, then click next to each student name that needs to be marked with the selected code.
   

5. Click the 'Submit' button at the bottom of the page.

Even if all students are present, the substitute teacher still needs to log in, click the "chair" icon for the current period, and click the submit button at the bottom of the page. This is the only way the system will know that all students are present.

*Please Note: You have signed your name to the Network and Electronic Mail Agreement, which explicitly prohibits sharing your password with any other person. Any reported violations are referred to the Technology Supervisor, who will take appropriate action.

http://goo.gl/gQLWp

During the month of December, 2010, I would like to begin using a feature called "Special Programs" in PowerSchool to track student participation in sports, clubs, and other activities. We have been tracking these student groups using the "Activities" feature, but have discovered that PowerSchool keeps no historical record of which "Activities" a student has participated in past school years. As you can imagine, this makes it quite difficult to ascertain participation data for previous school years.

Fortunately, the "Special Programs" feature does keep historical records, so it makes sense to transition our record keeping to it. This article describes how to accomplish the basic tasks of:

1. Adding a single student to a Special Program
2. Adding a group of students to a Special Program
3. Retrieve a list of names of those students currently participating in a Special Program

Click the 'read more' link below to continue...

Maintaining the Current Grade Display configuration is vital to ensure that PowerSchool is accurately displaying and calculating grades for the current term. It controls which grades and assignments are viewable on the Parent Portal, the grades shown on the Quick Lookup screen in the Admin portion of PowerSchool, and which grades, assignments and attendance data are emailed home to the parents automatically. This page should be updated at the end of each grading term.

Click 'Read More' below to continue...

Introducing PowerTeacher Mobile for the iPad™!

One of the fastest growing classroom management solutions is now available for the iPad. With PowerTeacher Mobile, teachers are no longer constrained to their desk or laptop when using the gradebook. They can record student scores and make observations about student progress from individual student desks, the gym, playground, at a sporting event or while on a field trip.

Get PowerTeacher Mobile for free:

Pearson School Systems

PowerSchool at Muscatine Schools now displays an alert for students that have an IEP.

This alert works just like the existing alerts (Health, Guardian, etc). It's icon is a light bulb, inspired by the law that governs IEPs, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or "IDEA".

When you click the light bulb alert icon, a small window opens and displays information regarding the student's IEP as defined by the IEP Responsibility Teacher, including:

• IEP Indicator Value
• IEP Goal Areas
• Last Updated By (ie, Responsibility Teacher Name)
• Date of Last Update

What makes this Student Alert unique is the fact that the information it displays is entered by a teacher from within the PowerTeacher environment. In our school district, teachers who are responsible for the implementation of an IEP are known as "Responsibility Teachers". These teachers are assigned a section of a course known as "Responsibility". By doing this, these instructors get a list of their IEP students in PowerTeacher, regardless of whether or not they have the student in any of their other courses.

Responsibility teachers use the IEP Goal Areas student screen to enter the information we collect in PowerSchool regarding IEPs. This screen is accessed by clicking the 'Backpack' icon for their Responsibility Class, clicking the name of a student, and then choosing it from the drop-down field located in the upper right corner of the screen.

Once on the IEP Goal Areas student screen, the Responsibility teacher performs their data entry, then clicks the submit button. The information is stored in PowerSchool and is viewable on the Administration side, as well as by other teachers who have the student in one of their classes.

The final piece of this package is a Class Roster Report with the IEP information on it. This report is available to all teachers from within PowerTeacher, and should help the teacher identify students that have been placed in their class due to an IEP Goal Area.

Click the 'Read More' link below for sample screen shots, or to download this package.

http://goo.gl/kBbMT