Wednesday, September 4, 2013
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.
In today's installment of The Parent-Teacher Conference, I am both teacher and parent, asker and askee. I need your help with a piece I am putting together about PowerSchool and the parent portal that allows for 24/7 access to students' grades and attendance. Here's what I am curious about:
1. If you are a parent, do you use the parent portal at your child's school?
2. How often?
3. What, in your view, are the pros to this kind of software?
4. Conversely, what are the cons?
5. If you are a teacher or administrator, does your school offer parent access to PowerSchool?
6. Who decided to grant access, the superintendent? Head of school? Principal? Committee?
7. How's it all working out at your school?
And, of course, if you have any thoughts on the topic, feel free to use the contact me form over there ------------>
or email me at teacherlahey AT gmail DOT com.
Thanks!
In our school we use Maplewood (a similar program). We have a parent portal that can be accessed by all parents in our division (Grade 7-12). At the start of the year, parents are provided with sign-up information and it is their choice if they utilize it or not. As far as a I know, this was a collaborative decision by the administration in our division (board, superintendent, principals).
ReplyDeleteAs a small rural area, many of our families do not have high speed internet access so the transition to using the parent portal has been slow, but there are a lot of families that are definitely interested.
We actually had a parent portal when I was in high school (7 years ago) and we used Edline (again, same kind of program). It was well used in our home community, my parents didn't have high speed internet but they checked it from work.
Mrs. T (The teacher formally known as Miss L)
Miss L's Whole Brain Teaching