PowerSchool Unified Classroom vs. Smartsheet

In the classroom it is very well suited. For classroom teachers, and for school systems in general. It is appropriate in this capacity because it creates a streamlined sense of communication for all stakeholders: teachers, parents, students, and administration. It makes parent meetings very easy, it makes interventions for students easy, and it helps administration keep tabs on overall progress

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Smartsheet shines for collaboration. When you have multiple people involved with planning events Smartsheet makes it easy to share and collaborate. For instance, multiple people can be in Smartsheet working at the same time. Also setting permissions for exactly those who need to know is quite easy with Smartsheet. For data analytics and general spreadsheet purposes Excel is better but for project management and event planning Smartsheet is superior

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• Hand in/Hand Out Assignments
• Standards Based Assessments

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• Its hard to overstate the value of familiarity. Being able to use a tool that has some familiarity takes away the time needed to train and orient employees on a new tool and allows an organization to hit the ground running.
• Smartsheet covers most of the basics of a project management tool, the usual tasks, milestones and project viewing options.
• For data viewing, you get multiple data viewing options including a calendar view (good for marketing teams and those who work around scheduling), Kanban, Gaant etc

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• The user interface is a little blocky and not entirely user-friendly.
• It does take more training than we'd like with new staff.

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• Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
• Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency

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It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.

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Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions

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They are very responsive to the issues that we have and follow through with their assistance. Having a live assist that is available when our teachers need it is essential too. They also seem to listen to suggestions on making improvements and have been transparent with us when renovations are done.

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I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.

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It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.

I have used markbook and gradebook. Each system had good features that were slightly different but the fact that this one is web based and accessible makes it the best of the 3 I have used. The learning curve to using the program is similar to the other 2 and overall has allowed me to save time reporting to students and parents.

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Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!

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• Positive impact- i don't know how much it costs but every teacher spends probably 1-4 hours on powerschool every week but it streamlines communication

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• This has really opened up collaboration across teams. A lot less working in silos.
• It hasn't fully replaced any one tool so it means having to go to another place. Hopefully, we can eliminate a tool or two in the next six months.

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info