View Session Schedule with times and days
Session 1 (Day 1)
Scheduling (Prepare to Build/Load) (all levels) – Greg Satterwhite
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.
What’s New in PowerSchool 11 and the Unified Classroom? (all levels) – Jason Springel
This session will cover all of the new features in PowerSchool 11 as well as the most up-to-date information on recent or upcoming updates as of the time of the PSUG conference, including an overview of Student Contacts! You will also learn about the Unified Classroom, the future of PowerSchool SIS. The Unified Classroom brings together PowerSchool SIS, PowerTeacher Pro, PowerSchool Learning, and PowerSchool Assessment into a single unified interface that provides easy access to all of this functionality.
Intro to Customization (Intermediate, Advanced) – Adam Larsen
You may have heard that PowerSchool is customizable, but what does that mean? This session will introduce system administrators to the basics of customization, including enabling and using Custom Page Management, editing existing pages, and creating page fragments.
PowerSchool 101: Admin Portal (Novice) – Alicia Ohnstad
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 with student selections, and transfer a student out of school.
Data Cleaning (Intermediate, Advanced) – John Dunleavy
Clean Data is Happy Data. We will look at built-in tools, and add-ons that will help you uncover data errors. Then we will set about correcting them. We will also cover some data validation techniques to get the info entered correctly.
Session 2 (Day 1)
Enterprise Reporting – Creating Custom Reports (Intermediate, Advanced, Expert) – Jason Springel
Enterprise Reporting is the most exciting reporting and data extraction tool you have ever seen! This session will cover everything there is to know about Enterprise Reporting. We will show all of the features that are available to users who run reports, and then learn how to build your own custom Enterprise Reports.
Intro to HTML/CSS (Intermediate, Advanced) – Adam Larsen
PowerSchool is a website, and websites are laid out using HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and styled with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This session will teach you the basic of both, including the usual HTML tags, their default display behavior, and how to alter their appearance with CSS. We will also cover CSS selectors, IDs, and classes, as well as HTML forms.
PowerSchool 102: Admin Portal Continued (Novice) – Alicia Ohnstad
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.
Migrating Custom Fields / Working With Database Extensions (Intermediate, Advanced) – John Dunleavy
The basics of migrating your custom fields to PowerSchool’s Database Extension Tables. Pre-Migration Tasks, Planning, and Migration will be covered. Then we dive into how to use those Extended Tables in Exports, on Screen, and in Object Reports
Session 3 (Day 2)
PowerTeacher Pro – Teachers (all levels)
Come to this session to learn how teachers use and interact with PowerTeacher Pro and their grading data, including assignments, student view, running reports, and the student metrics and progress areas.
Intro to SQL (Intermediate, Advanced)
Are you limited by the export functionality of DDE or export templates and looking for a more powerful way to do exports? Do you ever look at custom pages and wonder what the tlist_sql stuff is and how to modify it? This session will introduce you to SQL, also known as Structured Query Language. You’ll learn how to use it with Oracle SQL Developer to get around the limits of PS exports, and get a basic understanding of how it works for use in custom pages and reporting engine reports.
PowerSchool 103: Teacher/Sub/Parent/Student Portals (Novice)
This session continues your journey through getting to know PowerSchool into the teacher, sub, and parent/student portals. On the teacher side, learn how teachers are able to access different information for their classes and take attendance in different ways. On the parent/student side, see how one of the most useful aspects of PowerSchool is the real-time access to assignments, grades, attendance, and other data that students and parents have. However, giving them this access requires some setup. Learn how student and parent accounts are created and managed, and receive some tips and tools for support and training parents in the process. Additionally, learn how to control which pages they have access to in the Parent/Student Portal.
Attendance Overview (Novice, Intermediate) – John Dunleavy
Exactly what it sounds like! Learn all about attendance setup and usage in PowerSchool and which methods are the best for you. Find today’s absentee information and run reports on attendance summaries and totals over time.
MBA Report Card Creator and Custom Alerts Demonstration (all levels) – Joy Vallosio, remote
This session will demonstrate two excellent and useful PowerSchool plugins available for purchase from Marcia Brenner Associates:
The first is the Report Card Creator plugin, which allows for easy creation of sophisticated traditional- and standards-based HTML report cards in PowerSchool (much more flexibility than standard object reports). These reports can be archived to a student’s record as well as published to the teacher and parent/student portals easily.
The second is Custom Alerts, which allows for the creation of student alerts with different icons, colors, text, and information according to your school’s needs. These can be tied to advanced SQL-based triggers for added complexity.
Session 4 (Day 2)
PowerTeacher Pro – Administrators (all levels) – Jason Springel
Learn all about PowerTeacherPro, PowerSchool’s latest Gradebook. Discuss best practices for the transition from PowerTeacher Gradebook, back-end setup, and the roadmap for future enhancements.
Data Access Tags (DAT Codes) (Intermediate, Advanced) – Adam Larsen
Data Access Tags (DAT Codes) are snippets of PowerSchool HTML that can be used to export data, modify output, and even perform simple logic. They are the building blocks of Object Reports, Report Card headers and footers, and PS HTML pages.
Intro to Importing/Exporting (Novice, Intermediate) – Alicia Ohnstad
There are many ways to get data in and out of PowerSchool. This session will look at the beginner (List Students, Quick Export) and intermediate (system reports, using import/export templates, importing into different tables, using sqlReports) options in depth. Advanced options (Direct Database Export/Direct Database Access, Data Export Manager, and Enterprise Reporting) are covered in separate sessions.
End-of-Year/Start-of-Year Process (Intermediate, Advanced) – Romy Backus
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.
Session 5 (Day 2)
Putting It All Together – Adding HTML Reports for the Teacher Side (Intermediate, Advanced, Expert) – Adam Larsen
Put together all the knowledge you’ve gained in the first four sessions into a hands-on project! Have you ever wanted to have a report available to your teachers using tlist_sql (a custom screen)? This class will cover generating tlist_sql reports and customizing so your new reports will be added to the teacher select list when logged in as a teacher to PowerSchool. This is not directly in the gradebook but in the teachers login.
Grading Overview – Options in Traditional and Standards Grading (Novice) – Alicia Ohnstad
Find out about the ways that PowerSchool can handle both traditional and standards-based grading, or a combination of the two, and get a handle on how each of these types works as you proceed through the grading and reporting life cycle in PowerSchool.
Direct Database Export/Direct Database Access (DDA/DDE) and Data Export Manager (DEM) Deep Dive (Intermediate, Advanced, Expert) – John Dunleavy
In this session, we will approach PowerSchool from the inside out learning about the relational database and how to export information from multiple tables at the same time (without having to have an ODBC connection set up to pull the data.) We will also learn how to make mass modifications to the database (with great caution!), which can save a tremendous amount of time. Finally, learn how Data Export Manager (DEM) differs from DDA and how to extract what you need from there.
Manipulating PowerSchool with Page Fragments and Insertion Points (Advanced/Expert) – Kaelon Egan, remote
This class will focus on understanding how to use page fragments and insertion points. Attendees will learn how to create system-wide content with a single page fragment and how to manipulate PowerSchool content using JavaScript in page fragments.
Session 6 (Day 3)
Scheduling Lab – Greg Satterwhite
Apply everything you’ve learned in Prepare to Build and Load to your own schedule, with Greg’s expert help.
Modern PowerSchool Security (Novice, Intermediate) – Jason Springel
This session will bring you up to speed on field level security, user access roles, document attachment security and more. Come learn critical information for keeping your system secure and also how to take advantage of the greatly expanded flexibility PowerSchool now offers.
Intro to Object Reports (Novice) – Alicia Ohnstad
Learn how to create custom PDF reports for students, placing various elements such as text, images, and student field values. We will create a demographics and emergency info summary page with student photo that can be printed out for review.
Must-Have Customizations (Intermediate, Advanced) – John Dunleavy
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 – PDS, NickTech, SIS Resources, etc. We will also incorporate Insertion Points and Page Fragments. This is a good course to take if you are unable to take Adam’s customization track or delve deeply into learning to write your own code, but would still like to enhance your system with some great free plugins.
PowerSchool API and PowerQueries (Advanced, Expert) – Chris Walberg, intellimedia (remote)
Accessing data in a structured manageable way. Learn about the capabilities of the PowerSchool API including the addition of PowerQueries to access the PowerSchool data in a maintainable way. A common documented approach for external data access, integrations and customizations.
Session 7 (Day 3)
Scheduling Lab – Greg Satterwhite
Apply everything you’ve learned in Prepare to Build and Load to your own schedule, with Greg’s expert help.
Student Contacts Preview Release Deep Dive (all levels) – Jason Springel
Do you have a lot of custom fields that hold student contacts’ data? What’s the best way to manage the transition to the new Student Contacts feature to ensure clean data and minimal confusion? How do you import new contacts rather than having to enter them manually? Come to this session to learn the answer to all these questions and more.
Automating Data Tasks (Advanced, Expert) – Adam Larsen
As schools become more data-driven in their decision making, it is becoming increasingly important to provide consistent, quality data to teachers and school administrators. One easy way to reduce the workload this places on the IT department and to ensure data integrity is to automate routine tasks. Do you have reports that need to be run at the same time each week? Schedule a job to run and e-mail a file without human input at regular intervals. Attendees will learn about tools for scheduling tasks, queries that change behavior depending on the time of year, and tips for “set-it-and-forget-it” data schedules. This session will walk users through the Navicat program, but skills and approaches learned here can be generalized to other software packages. Intended audience: PowerSchool system administrators. Requirements: working knowledge of SQL.
PowerSchool Resources (Novice, Intermediate) – John Dunleavy
Did you know there are a lot more places you can get PowerSchool help and training than just calling support? This session will help you help yourself become an expert by providing you with an overview of the many resources for information and assistance in the PowerSchool world.
Standards Setup and Implementation (Novice, Intermediate) – Romy Backus
Come to this session to 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.
PowerSchool Users' Group - Middle East & Africa 