PowerSchool Unified Classroom vs. Renaissance DnA

We use PowerSchool Unified Classroom with our Teacher/Student work. Teachers can hand out assignments and have them edited and returned to the teacher in an organized folder, in which the teacher can review, grade, and send back to the student. Papers are never lost this way. Another way that PowerSchool Unified Classroom is used is to deliver assessments for district tests.

Incentivized

Can be used in any sized school district.

Incentivized

• It easily makes calculations for you to come up with a mark easily.
• It allows me to put my comments on assignments into the grade so that students get feedback quickly and easily.
• It is easy to use.

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• Online assessment creation
• Online assessment administration
• Data analysis
• Data tracking

Incentivized

• I teach 15 different sections of classes and it is hard to view sections all at once to enter grades in
• Navigating through all of the tabs to know how to view grades is hard- whether it is Assignments view, or by students, etc.

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• It would be nice if it communicated in real time with our other student database systems. We have to do a nightly update to share information with other systems, and still, some data gets stuck and needs to be "wiped".
• The intervention tracking system, OnTrack, is difficult to set up and manage.
• Assessment item banks could offer a better variety of items.

Incentivized

Illuminate DnA is a very usable system. A few items to learn and set up can be a bit time-consuming. However, once set up it is easy to use and powerful for a school that staff can master quickly. It has more features then we actually use but I hope we will over time.

Incentivized

They are very responsive to the issues that we have and follow through with their assistance. Having a live assist that is available when our teachers need it is essential too. They also seem to listen to suggestions on making improvements and have been transparent with us when renovations are done.

Incentivized

Our issue was never resolved so that we could use the software to produce accurate reports. Their tech department looked into the issue several times and could never figure out why our student was off and then they just closed the case. They confirmed we were performing the correct steps to load the data and they confirmed our data looked accurate. Great, but again why was our student count off?

Incentivized

PowerSchool is similar to Schoology but actually has one less component: assignment uploads. Schoology is very helpful because it also students to upload their assignments on dropbox, which syncs automatically to the grade book, which allows me to view who has submitted things on time and who hasn't. I'm able to create Rubrics in Schoology itself which also helps the grading process because it ties in directly to their overall grade after I submit their rubric scores. Powerschool is helpful because it allows for attendance and access across the board with all parties.

Incentivized

Illuminate DnA offers more flexibility and additional features that our previous Data Director system offered. We were looking for a system that offered an online assessment portal and the ability to create elementary standard-based report cards when we selected the illuminate DnA software. We were impressed with the ability to easily create custom reports and liked the comprehensive student profile page.

Incentivized

• PowerSchool has successfully helped us create a database on our students and allow staff to quickly access student information.
• We have been able to coordinate the arrival of new students to multiple teams for student support.

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• We tried to get the product to work for our needs for over a year and could not get it to work and therefore it cost us $20,000 with no results and easily over 40+ hours of wasted time.

Incentivized