Over the weekend PowerSchool was migrated to new hardware and updated to version 6.2.1. About a month ago Pearson tech support recommended in their release notes that California customers upgrade to the newest version of PowerSchool to ensure compatibility with California Reporting. Our PowerSchool application at the time was using an older 32-bit version of Windows 2003 R2 and a 32-bit Oracle database. We upgraded to new hardware with Windows 2008 SP2 64-bit and the new 64-bit Oracle 10g R2 Enterprise database for PowerSchool. The move to 64-bit Windows and Oracle will bring increased data processing power and the ability to utilize greater amounts of RAM. After upgrading the operating system and the Oracle database, PowerSchool 6.2.1 was installed and our data was migrated to the new server. The new version of PowerSchool also included PowerTeacher 2.1, a new version of our teacher grade book and attendance software.
Key Features of PowerSchool 6.2
• PowerTeacher 2.0 with full support for standards
• Mobile Web Pages for administrators and teachers
• Single Sign-On for parents with multiple students, plus automated password recovery for parents
• A new Graduation Planner
• ReportWorks 1.2
• Attendance Tracking & Notification
• Variable Credit for Alternative Education
Key features of PowerTeacher 2.0
• Associating any number of standards to an assignment
• Quick score entry using the new standards drawer
• New Student View mode on the Score sheet, allowing teachers to review all scores and determine final standards grades
• Automatic calculation of standards final grades based on a choice of sophisticated grading measures
• Key enhancements such as the inclusion of student photos, quick launch button, a preference to hide students not yet enrolled, performance improvements, and more!
I appreciate your feedback, so please let me know what you think of the upgrade.
