Session Catalog

General

Intro to PowerSchool – Part 1

Welcome to PowerSchool! This session will get you started with the very basics PowerSchool with an overview of the four different portals: administrator, teacher, substitute, and parent/student. Then, go more in-depth on the admin side by learning how to enroll a new student, search for students, find student information on student pages, work efficiently with student selections, and transfer a student out of school.

Intro to PowerSchool – Part 2

This session continues where Part 1 left off. Learn how to create new teachers or admin users, switch schools and terms, create courses and sections, enroll/drop students from those sections properly, and much more.

Student Contacts Deep Dive

Come to this session to for a deep dive into working with Student Contacts records. Learn how to search, import, export, and consolidate, how to control their display on the teacher portal and in PTP, as well as explore some popular customizations to make life with Contacts easier.

Importing and Exporting – Part 1

There are many ways to get data in and out of PowerSchool. This session will look at the beginner (List Students, Quick Export, AutoSend) and intermediate (system reports, using import/export templates, importing into common tables, using sqlReports) options in depth.

Importing and Exporting – Part 2

Part 2 of the double session, covering Data Export/Import Manager and working in DDE/DDA. Using real life scenarios we will focus on various PowerSchool tables, understanding the data in each table, how tables relate to each other, how to extract data from multiple tables and common table links. We will focus on the students, schedules (cc), courses, sections, teachers and stored grades tables. Understanding these tables will help you find and extract the data you need.

Final Grades: Pieces of the Puzzle

Understand the key pieces of the PowerSchool puzzle that lead to the grade results you see in Historical Grades and on transcripts. Learn how terms, grading periods, course structure, grade scale setup, gradebook configuration and the storing process all come together.

EOY/SOY Process

One of the biggest responsibilities of a PowerSchool Administrator is ensuring that the End-of-Year Process (aka rollover) goes smoothly and that everything is ready in the system for the new school year. We’ll walk through the timeline of tasks that need to be completed as well as look at some other tips and tricks that can save you time and hassle.

Standards Setup and Implementation

Learn the basics of setting up and implementing standards on your server. We will cover grade scales, calculation methods, importing, and how the data is used and viewed by administrators, teachers, parents, and students.

Managing Standardized Test Scores

This session will teach you how to create tests in PowerSchool and how to hand enter individual test scores. You will also learn how to import test scores, including how to build the import file. With test scores in PowerSchool, attendees will then learn ways to get the test scores out of PowerSchool with Data Access Tags on reports and exports. We will also cover advanced reporting with SQL and will briefly share more advanced interactions via the API. We’ll also demonstrate the free plugin available from ACME that enhances how your tests are displayed to your users. We will also explore how custom PQ DATs can help you report all test scores on your reports.

GPA Overview & Troubleshooting

There are a lot of moving parts to a properly-calculated GPA in PowerSchool. We will look at the source data building blocks, the differences in various calculation methods, how to use and export GPAs in various parts of the system, and finally troubleshooting when something doesn’t seem quite right.

PowerTeacher Pro Q & A

Come to this session with all your questions and issues around PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook.

Unified Account Management at ACS – OIDC with Google SSO, Active Directory and Gmail, Unified Password Reset

In this session, we will demonstrate how ACS Amman has integrated OIDC with Google SSO to create a workflow that allows for Account Unification and data transport with PowerSchool remaining the source of truth.
Session Outline: PS OIDC Certified SSO with Google Authentication, Google and Active Directory APIs Integrations, PS Students and Teachers List Exporter using PowerQuery, PowerSchool query within dashboard, Gmail and AD Bulk Accounts Creation, PowerSchool database integration, SYNC Gmail Accounts and OUs with Active Directory, Accounts Password Change Email Reminders, Reset Unified Password using the Employees card and Kiosk screens, Accounts Reports & Gmail, AD Statistics

Customization/Coding

Introduction to Customization

Want to start customizing PowerSchool? Learn the basics about Language Translation, Database Extensions, Custom Screens, and Custom Pages. We’ll demonstrate some beginner examples using the Custom Page Manager.

Must-Have Customizations

How to look like a genius with little effort. We will look at simple customizations using Custom Page Management, using what is available on PowerSource, PSUG and other outlets. This is a good course to take if you are unable to delve deeply into learning to write your own code, but would still like to enhance your system with some great free plugins.

Coding Basics in PowerSchool

PowerSchool uses web-standards such as HTML and CSS. This session will teach you the basics of HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and how its appearance is altered with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This session also covers the roles of tables in structuring data and how to use forms to make updates. We’ll introduce PSHTML, the codes specific to PowerSchool that populate the pages with data. Along the way we’ll equip you with tools like the built-in Custom Page Manager editor and other resources that will help you customize PowerSchool.

Beginner SQL

Learn the power of Structured Query Language (SQL) for accessing your PowerSchool data. This session will introduce writing basic SQL queries. We will introduce some options for directly testing your queries in PowerSchool, including Oracle SQLDeveloper and SQL Studio. Once you have a working SQL query, we will discuss ways to embed that inside PowerSchool, including the popular sqlReports plugin.

Intermediate SQL

Topics will include selection of distinct results, result concatenation, and aliasing. The primary focus will be querying related tables using SQL joins. We will dive deep into the differences between inner and left joins.

Advanced SQL

This session will cover more advanced SQL functions including aggregate functions: avg, count, min, max, and sum. Conditional logic (case statements), subqueries, the WITH clause, and pivots will also be discussed.

PowerQueries

PowerQueries are SQL queries that, when bundled properly, are embedded as part of the PowerSchool API. The results of these queries can be retrieved and scheduled in PowerSchool’s Data Export Manager. The queries can also be accessed in custom pages as a more secure alternative to tlist_sql, and exposed to select third-party applications to facilitate integration. We will discuss the process of creating and installing PowerQueries as PowerSchool plugins.

The Power of PowerQuery DATs

PowerQuery Data Access Tags are a brand new and an exciting development! They are custom DATs that can be used where all DATs are used, such as in reports and exports. This session will introduce what they are, how to use the PQ DATs that PowerSchool includes, how to find PQ DATs that have already been shared in the community, and finally, how to build your own. Examples shared will include student email, first day of enrollment in school/district, current grades and attendance, and test scores.

Getting Started with the PowerSchool API

PowerSchool’s API (Application Programming Interface) gives you a lot of flexibility with your customizations. Many pages in PowerSchool use the internal API to access data, and you can use it on your custom pages too! External applications can read from or write data to PowerSchool, allowing a lot of different automations to occur. This session is an overview of both APIs.

Customization: Putting it All Together

Live feats of daring coding! Bring your ideas for customizations (small to medium) and Vance, Roger, and Adrian will attempt to accomplish them together, applying the concepts taught and learned in the customization sessions.

Scheduling

Scheduling (Prepare to Build/Load) – 2 day workshop
Comprehensive PowerScheduler training over two full days! Join Greg for a complete run-through of the PowerSchool schedule building and loading process from beginning to end. If you sign up for this you are committing to attending the full two day workshop.

Course Prerequisites, Teacher Recommendations and Student Course Selection`

Come to this session to learn how to set up course prerequisites, train teachers to enter course recommendations for students, and finally how all these pieces fit together in allowing students to select and submit their course requests from the student portal in preparation for scheduling season.

Scheduling Lab
Apply everything you’ve learned in Prepare to Build and Load to your own schedule, with Greg’s expert help.

Schoology

Schoology for System Administrators
Schoology has built an interface for administrators to help them through what would otherwise be a complex set of procedures to customize the system-wide settings and provide for data integration. This session will focus in on leveraging the Schoology platform to get the most out of the system for your teachers and students alike. Let’s learn how we can increase engagement and improve teacher effectiveness through the various systems settings that you can control as administrators.

Schoology and Grade Syncing with PS SIS
Tired of manipulating two separate gradebooks? Schoology’s integration with the PowerSchool SIS will save teachers so much time to focus on the learning. This session will dive deep into the two-way integration between the Schoology LMS and PowerTeacher Pro, but particularly the grade passback for both numeric and standards-based grades.

Schoology and Standards Based Grading
PowerSchool understands that it is not just students’ numeric score that reflects their learning and understanding. Two students may receive the same numeric score but may have struggled with different concepts. As such, Schoology provides a Mastery Gradebook designed to provide teachers with enhanced ways to track student progress and provide insights they need to take meaningful action. In this session, we’ll discuss how this enhanced mastery tracking is part of Schoology’s overall effort to help educators further personalize the learning experience for each of their students.

Schoology for Educational Leaders
This session will dive deep into the thought around leveraging the Schoology platform outside of just the teacher’s singular classroom. Throughout the conversation, we will highlight how “powerusers” of Schoology use the solution to create an online environment where administrators can communicate, collaborate, support, and share resources with staff across campuses all in one place?

Engaging a School’s Youngest Learners with Schoology
As part of our on-going commitment to support the needs of young learners, Schoology has designed more ways for students to interact and annotate with their course materials. In this session, we will highlight Schoology’s enhanced elementary experience and how it provides a unique look and feel specific to the needs of young learners by emphasizing images, using colorful graphics, and simplifying navigation regardless of device.

Sponsor Sessions

Simplifying and securing payments across your school – GEST Consultancy

Fee collection and payments are a common challenge for schools across the globe with fees making up the majority of school income. Yet processes are often over-burdening for staff with cumbersome manual fee collection and reconciliation. Processes often lack from industry expectations from a security, fraud and cost perspective, whilst the customer experience is limited and often expensive. More than two thirds of parents rate the school fee payment process as poor.

Having built Global School Payments and implemented MyCampusCard across the Middle East (including the American School of Dubai in attendance) we are delighted to speak on how we can help schools become more secure and streamlined with their payment processes.

Marcia Brenner Associates – Report Creator, Attendance Monitor, and Alert Creator

Watch a demonstration of several of MBA’s popular PowerSchool plugins!

PowerSchool – Meet with Zach Davidson

Time to meet and discuss PowerSchool- and Schoology-related topics with Zach.