TrustRadius Insights for PowerSchool eSchoolPLUS are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
eSchoolPLUS is a versatile and comprehensive platform that serves as the backbone of educational institutions, enabling teachers, administrators, and staff to efficiently manage student information and ensure a high-quality education for all students. Teachers rely on the platform's teacher center to effortlessly grade assignments, while the HR department utilizes its backend for payroll and tracking teacher professional development. Administrators utilize eSchoolPLUS to house student data, manage attendance, and effectively communicate with parents and employees.
With its user-friendly login portal, eSchoolPLUS provides simple and easy access for users, allowing them to access the system with just one click using their username and password. The platform is used across the entire organization, serving as the primary source of essential educational data for all grade levels and content areas. It streamlines reporting to the state department of education by providing a centralized location for all necessary information and data on students. This ensures accurate and efficient data management while saving valuable time for educators.
eSchoolPLUS offers a wide range of use cases that cater to various needs within an educational institution. From scheduling management to attendance tracking, grading, parent communication, and health management, this robust platform empowers users with the tools they need to streamline processes and enhance collaboration. The system also facilitates smooth transitions when students transfer between buildings or schools by enabling quick access to their relevant data.
Guidance counselors find value in eSchoolPLUS as they utilize it to develop schedules for students, providing seamless accessibility for all users. Teachers depend on this platform not only to enter grades but also to print transcripts for their students. Administrative assistants benefit from eSchoolPLUS as they can print bus routes and efficiently manage student information.
Overall, eSchoolPLUS is a crucial tool that revolutionizes the way educational institutions operate by providing a centralized system that optimizes data management, enhances communication with stakeholders, and streamlines administrative processes. Its extensive features make it an invaluable asset in ensuring that every student receives the best education possible.
PowerSchool eSchoolPLUS is the primary SIS and singular source of all essential educational data for our organization. All crucial data, outside employment and financial, runs through eSchool. Scheduling management and design, attendance, grading, parent communication, health management, and all other data reside within the system as an easily accessible point for all educators to utilize.
Pros
Grading
Scheduling
Attendance
Reporting
Cons
Visualization
Printable reports
Graphs/dashboards
Likelihood to Recommend
PowerSchool eSchoolPLUS is a highly effective data warehouse, with easy input and nearly boundless ways to get to the raw information. For a team with strong capabilities in report writing (say, SQL/IBM Cognos, etc) the opportunity to get to the base of the information and communicate it well is incredibly strong. However, if you are relying on stock reports to get you what you need, it may be imperfect.
VU
Verified User
Executive in Finance and Accounting (1001-5000 employees)
Our entire organization uses the eSchoolPLUS platform across all grade levels and content areas. Administratively, this program is used to house student data, manage attendance, as well as communicate with parents as well as other employees. We manage contact data, testing scores, student information, ad well as grades and competencies.
Pros
One-stop resource for student data, from test scores to medical alerts.
Parent information, including contact and custody details, are readily accessible.
Clean and easy-to-use format makes finding what you need very easy.
Cons
Format, while easy to use, can appear dated and not eye-catching.
New users may be overwhelmed by the expansiveness of the product(s).
Likelihood to Recommend
As a classroom teacher, I can log into Power School eSchoolPLUS and access all pertinent information about a student. With contact information and a built-in email component to the program, I can speak to parents and other teachers within our organization efficiently. I can also access student testing data, medical information, and current academic performance to get a better picture of each student’s needs and circumstances.
We use PowerSchool eSchoolPLUS as our SIS system across the school district to track student demographics, attendance, and grades. All information that need to be reported to the state department of education is tracked through this platform. It helps us to have a mostly one place stop to look for information and data on our students.
Pros
Ease of entering information once familiar with platform.
One stop shop for information.
Customer service is easy to access to help in situations.
Cons
It can be difficult to find information when first beginning with it.
It can take many steps to perform one task.
Can run slowly on certain networks.
Likelihood to Recommend
We utilize PowerSchool every day in our classrooms for inputting data on our students regarding attendance and grades. We also use it to retrieve student information needed for various situations. The longer with use this platform, the easier it becomes us it and to know exactly where to go to find what we are needing.
eSchoolPLUS is actually used across a wide spectrum of operations within the school district. It addresses more issues and problems than I could have imagined. Looking into how teachers use it, administrators use it, and Human Resources uses it, this platform has a large degree of application. For teachers, it is the most effective because it allows tracking of all students and family information from grades K through 12. The school performance benchmarks for students are tracked through every single grade, a huge asset to making sure that all students are receiving the best education possible because all stakeholders are up to date on the students' performance as well as their needs. The log-in portal makes it very simple and easy to access. It has one-click access, just put in your user name and password and you can access the portal. The teacher center is used for grading, while the HR department is able to use its backend for payroll and tracking teacher PD.
Pros
The user interface is spectacular. By being able to access grades and all student data in one place, it really makes parent-teacher meetings easy and quick. Most parents come into meeting with teachers already seeing all the progress of the students. This increases engagement definitely within the district.
Working with school operations is important. Most schools have multiple platforms for every single aspect of education. Having the payroll portal accessible with the same login for your school and student information makes it easy for us teachers. I guess the strength would be how they have streamlined a lot of the day to day tasks of all departments affiliated with schools, and they made it accessible in one web platform.
Tracking your own professional development courses can be lengthy. Inputting and tracking them via the website makes it easier and less paperwork.
Naturally, the most important strength is the mobile capability of the platform. Being able to be mobile so teachers, parents, students, and admin can access any and all documentation is important. Websites are difficult to navigate, so having a web platform helps greatly.
Cons
One area with room for improvement would be in the ability to message counselors within the platform. Sending emails is lengthy. Some platforms allow for you to text/chat message other logged in users in real time. This would be a great help to quickly reach out to specific teachers, admin or counselors. Communication is important and that feature would improve usage.
The experts at Power School are very supportive. The tech team makes it easy to use with professional development, but I think teachers need easier literature on how to access all the functions and features of the platform. Maybe an online version where when you click your interest it will direct you to how to access certain parts of the portal and what they do. With such a vast platform it is pretty cumbersome.
I would love to be able to download the charts and graphs that come up with students in the student portal. The key student performance indicators are great to follow, but downloading them as image files would be great to use for presentations and sharing with other people within the school.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for Charter Schools. I say charter schools because most charts are built from the ground up, and using a specific set of tools from PowerSchool will help all departments to work seamlessly together. The hardest part of the education process is being able to track your own payroll, PD, overtime hours, emails and messages, grades and documentation for students. Schools in perpetual existence have a hard time converting all their documents and processes to a brand new portal. However, new schools, private schools, charter schools, even new online universities would have an easier and much more effective time purchasing and using every single tool that comes from PowerSchool. I believe that it is bigger than just using eSchoolPLUS for education, but using efinance, and atrieve are important also. In terms of eSchoolPLUS it is useful in all schools because it does make the teacher's jobs easier. Managing curriculum, lesson and grade data is quick and easy and engagement is relatively simple on the website and on my mobile iPhone.
eSchoolPLUS is being used across our whole organization as our student information system, to store and access all our district's student and teacher information.
Pros
Allows us to access our student information quickly.
Allows us to perform advanced searches to find data quickly.
Offers us a one-stop place for all our student information needs.
Cons
When updates are made, little bugs in the updates break other issues that weren't broken before.
I'd like to see more testing done before updates are released to minimize troubleshooting time.
Tickets for bugs/repairs often take a long time to be processed and fixed.
Likelihood to Recommend
eSchoolPLUS allows our entire organization to access Student Information quickly and easily, and allows us to format the data we need in a user-friendly environment. eSchoolPLUS has a few flaws, as it seems to not be thoroughly tested before releasing updates from user tickets that cause other functionality to break in an attempt to fix another issue.
eSchoolPlus was used across the whole organization for student data management in a school district. When students transferred between buildings/schools, users could easily access the coursework, student information, etc. previously entered. Guidance counselors developed schedules for students that all users could look at. Teachers used eSchoolPlus to enter grades for students and print transcripts. Administrative assistants used the management system too print bus routes.
Pros
Data Management - Tabs are easy to read for user friendly usage.
Online platform - ability to access from multiple locations by multiple users.
Constant updates - listen to the consumer to update for needs.
Cons
Sometimes crashes and has to be restarted.
Many features that sometimes makes it complicated to find intricate usable items.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for school management systems, specifically for data management. Teachers entered in grades, but another system needed to be used to calculate grades. It would be nice to be able to enter in each individual assignment into eSchoolPlus for a full record of the students' achievement in the classroom.