iTunes has created apps to help you decide where to eat, keep up with the latest news and stay on top of your teams’ stats – now they’ve gone even further with an app to monitor your child’s education.
Students and parents in the nine schools that make up the East Haven School District are now connected to the public portal of PowerSchool and can log in to check grades, assignments, attendance and other information.
Randel Osborne, technology specialist for the East Haven Public School district, said they opened the parent and student portal on July 9th of 2011.
“Students in grades 6-12 may log into the public portal to get assignments, grades and attendance. Parents of all students can log into the public portal to check attendance and parents’ grades 6-12 can also check grades and assignments,” Osborne said.
The difference in the two portals is that students have access to just their data and parents often have multiple students in the school system and are now able to monitor all of them Osborne said.
Parents of children in grades K through 5 do not have the option of checking anything besides attendance because, “typically it is grades 6-12 that organize courses around assignments. Our kindergartener’s day is not made of courses per se, but activities,” said Osborne.
The PowerSchool Student App and PowerSchool Parent App for IOS devices, including iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, were both released on Jan. 18. Since then, the app supports more than 10 million students and is currently being used in 65 countries.
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“I would say the reception has been fantastic. We have nearly 600 parent users at the moment,” Osborne said. “Student users are enthusiastic, especially with the release of the power school student app. Viewing your information on a website is great. Having that same information organized on an IOS app is even better.”
For those who are less technologically inclined, PowerSchool can be accessed from any computer simply by entering a username and password – the same credentials that parents and students in the East Haven School District use to log into the school computers. The site is linked directly to the teacher’s electronic grade book, making the PowerSchool portal an easy transition for teachers as well as students and parents.
“I think we’re seeing feedback from teachers that students are much more aware of assignments and hopefully time management,” Osborne said. “We hope this technology advances student achievement and the state of public schools.”
