Most of the students attending York High School in Elmhurst will not receive a report card this year, but they–and their parents–will be watching their grades more closely than ever.
That’s because York will roll out an electronic, Web-based student management system called PowerSchool (www.apple.com/education/powerschool). It lets teachers, students and parents access grades, attendance and school announcements from any computer with an Internet connection.
“It’s a great way to instantly link students with their grades,” said Diana Smith, the high school’s principal.
Indeed, students can track a running grade for each of their subjects at any moment.
And they do check.
When York piloted the program for about 250 of its 2,500 students last year, about 60 percent of them were checking their grades every day.
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And the parents?
“Some parents will always check, and some don’t at all,” said Smith. “But this allows all parents to be a little more on top of where their kids are [scholastically].”
But the PowerSchool system offers much more than parental involvement: the promise of better learning for the kids.
Although there isn’t a lot of research in this area, “the research that exists does say that students tend to perform better when they see their results immediately,” Smith said.
“Students have told me it helps them to see the immediate effects of their work.”
But teachers probably get the greatest value from the system and the technology it runs on.
Until four years ago, York High School operated in a building built in the 1920s, with about 200 older Apple desktop computers for the entire school. Today, York has 1,000 mostly IBM and Dell PCs, including four mobile carts with 30 laptops each, in a new building with wireless network access.
And all 170 teachers have their own IBM ThinkPad laptops, which they use for planning their lessons, delivering lectures, taking attendance and issuing grades.
“The teachers are thrilled with doing their grades and attendance online,” said Smith. “We have no paper. We just extract the grades electronically.”
Which is exactly what York will do for the students and parents it expects will sign up for electronic access to the system this year.
“Normally, we send out four quarterly report cards and four more interim report cards, times 3,000, for 2,500 students plus 500 parents who live separately and want to see the grades.”
And, Smith said, that’s a lot of paper and money saved.