PowerSchool Student Information System vs. Rediker Administrator's Plus

PowerSchool is great for schools to keep track of student information, schedules, and grades. It integrates with other programs to make setting up classes easier and faster. PowerSchool gives teachers a singular place to find information or input students' grades. It also has an app for parents or guardians to use to check their student's grades which is very useful.

Incentivized

It's a great system for storing student information and extracting it into usable data. If you're looking for a robust report creation system, though, it's not the best choice unless you have someone skilled with programming languages.

Incentivized

• PowerSchool houses student or staff information that can be easily accessed by those teachers and administrators who need the information. This allows everyone to go to one place to access information.
• Parents can view their child's grades at any time with their protected login on a parent portal. This allows teachers to keep parents informed and involved in their child's progress at school. When everyone works together it increases our students' chance for success.
• PowerSchool offers videos to train new users. When we have new employees, the videos can be accessed at any time the employee needs as opposed to them waiting for someone to help them.

Incentivized

• The ease of data exports into easy Excel Spreadsheets is one of my favorite features. It allows me the ability to quickly see data and arrange it for ease of use of our teachers, administrative staff, and stakeholders.
• Administrative Plus can be easily customized to display student record data in the most relevant way for our organization.
• The customer service support team is always quick to respond, and extremely helpful. I can reach them through user forums, emails, or a phone call, and I know they will always provide a fast and thorough response.

Incentivized

• The user interface could be more intuitive. Because of the many features, it can sometimes be difficult for administrators to find what they are looking for.
• A recent upgrade allowing for more flexibility in the relationship between students and parents was long in coming and didn't go very smoothly. We are now dealing with a ton of clean-up after the upgrade. Even after we have cleaned everything up, there is still a ways to go before PowerSchool is on par with other SIS systems in that area. In their defense though, they are actively working on getting caught up.

Incentivized

• Their reports feature needs to be more user friendly. They use their own personal code to write reports, and it's not very user friendly to the average person. It would be much nicer to have a WYSIWYG editor where I could create what I wanted without having to know their special language.
• The system could use a more modern face lift, and perhaps a more intuitive interface.
• The sync process between the Parent, Teacher, and Student Portals is slow. Data should be continually synced between the two in real time, instead of initiated by the user.

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The district is unlikely to change systems due to the cost of training and tech support to facilitate such a switch.

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Great features, but it can feel very cumbersome at times

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Overall, I have not had to use support for PowerSchool Student Information System because our school district gives us training in each area in which we will be utilizing PowerSchool Student Information System. In terms of in-user support, I feel that there is mild to moderate user support that is built into PowerSchool SIS.

Incentivized

Each software I used in my career had special features which were specifically unique for them. PowerSchool Student Information System was an impressive software that offered the ability to ease student registrations and admissions online using web forms where students and parents could submit and upload their information and necessary documents to the school/institute with just a few clicks. Even though this feature is available on a few other similar software, PowerSchool Student Information System was the only software that was specialized in this area.

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We were using Aeries for our student information system prior to Rediker, and it was a messy database with too much redundancy, making it difficult to extract the data you were looking for from the system.

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• Having one system within the school district is beneficial. Teachers are able to access a variety of information and also do input all within the same program.
• Communication with parents has been impacted greatly, as they always have information at their fingertips without teachers having to call or email them with a grade update. Parents are able to check student's grades at any time.

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• A less expensive alternative as far as Student Information Systems go.

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