Power School and Power Grade

Our school uses Power School and Power Grade to manage student information. These programs work fairly well when everyone jumps on-board (or online) with the system. However, when individual teachers reject new ideas or programs, it makes implementation of new technologies especially difficult.

In our school, we have two groups of programs, the vocational programs and the alternative high school. The alternative high school faces different challenges than the vocational programs in terms of accountability and curriculum requirements. After all, the alternative high school teachers are academic teachers approaching traditional curriculum in different, often unique ways. While I teach science, my approach probably is not the same as that used by colleagues in traditional, regular education classrooms.

Our school decided some years ago (apparently before I arrived in September '06) to implement the PowerSchool and PowerGrade systems. These systems work very well for teachers and administrators in terms of recording attendance and grades. The online nature of PowerSchool enables parents and students to regularly track these statistics, hopefully improving academic performance. Unfortunately, I find myself in a distinct minority when it comes to embracing this system. As the only teacher in the alternative high school program to use PowerGrade and PowerSchool exclusively for my gradebook/attendance record, I risk becoming the outcast when the teachers fight against being told it is mandatory that they use the system.

I find the program has problems, but I am willing to work around them, learning how to deal with them, and make suggestions for improvement. Sad to say, this is not always true of my colleagues. Today's society is so reliant upon technology, yet it is a sorry state when the educators of our youth do not recognize the importance of using it in the classroom. I can only hope that my colleagues accept the change and attempt to learn how to work within the system as I am, instead of bucking it at every turn.