A Few Things to Know

This application is meant to help inform day-to-day operations in schools and what to do with the students who are in front of you. It is designed with that goal in mind. While PowerSchool may be able to replace certain reports that used to be run by hand, there are a couple things that are important to know when analyzing the data available to you:

• PowerSchool is not a replacement for Synergy. In fact, PowerSchool can't exist without Synergy feeding it data. Synergy is how we collect and organize data while PowerSchool is like a window into Synergy, taking things like the daily attendance of each student and rolling it into a larger chart to help inform us of trends.

• Most of the data that you see is from yesterday. Each night, our system (Synergy) sends the day's data to PowerSchool, who updates their databases and visualizations. That means that anything that is entered into Synergy today will not be present in PS until tomorrow. This allows for corrections to be made and for the activity of the day to settle down before the data is sent.

• Data is organized by Serving school only. Students must be loaded in as attending a school (only one), and we need school personnel to be able to see the students enrolled at their school. This means that while official reports will still calculate many figures using Responsible school, PowerSchool can only show you the data by Serving school. It won't be the same as official reports, but will always address those students who are active, enrolled, and available for you to help (re: inform day-to-day operations)

• You can only see students who you have access to. If you are a school administrator, you can only see the students currently enrolled in your school. If you are a teacher, you can only see the students currently enrolled in your classes. If a student moves schools or moves classes, you no longer see their data. Pretend that each student carries with them a backpack of all of their data, current and historical. When they leave, the data goes with them. When new students arrive, they add all their data to the graphs you see to give you a representative idea not necessarily of what's happened at the school, but rather what's happened with the students who are currently there.

Introductory Video

Below you will find  a 15-minute introductory video for the platform. Alternative / additional tutorial videos can be found on the "Tutorial Modules" page of this website.

Please note that while this video references dashboards from the administrative "Essentials" module, the "Classroom" module available for teachers functions in much the same way.

One-pagers

Here you will find links to written one-pagers on a variety of topics from logging in to manipulation of lists and charts.