Power Teacher Pro Updates

PowerSchool update 20.4 has brought several new features and enhancements to PowerTeacher and the PowerTeacher Pro (PTP) grade book. This post will review some of the significant new features and how to access information on all of the new features and enhancements.

For those of you that are new to PowerTeacher or have not used it much I want to clarify the difference between PowerTeacher and PowerTeacher Pro.

PowerTeacher is the landing page for all teachers in PowerSchool. It is where you take attendance, setup seating charts, see your schedule, run reports, and many other features. It is not a grade book.

PowerTeacher Pro (PTP) is a relatively new grade book for PowerSchool. It has been around for about 5 years. The old PowerSchool grade book is being phased out. PTP is where you setup and grade assignments, group students, run progress and other reports, and access other features. PTP is where the new features reviewed below are accessed.

Student Contacts

Student contacts are now available in PTP. Contacts have been available in PowerTeacher for awhile through the use of a customized plug-in. PowerSchool has now added student contacts to the student demographics page in PTP. After selecting Demographics, contact information is below the student information. 

We will leave the customized contacts enabled because in some cases they are more convenient to use. However, the new Student Contacts feature in PTP adds some contact fields when printing Student roster reports.

Email

Another new feature in PTP is Email. You can now send emails to students, parents, or both using PTP. You access the Email feature by clicking on the Create (small plus symbol in the upper right) and picking Email from the list.

Use the Select Classes drop down to select one or more classes. Use the recipient checkbox on the left to select students and on the right to select student contacts. Use the Filter section to narrow down your choices. Click on the Message tab to enter the subject and text of the email. Use the CC Me checkbox to receive a copy of the email. Please note, the email feature can only be used to send simple text only email messages. If you want to send a newsletter, form, link, or other non text item use School Messenger.

Back on the Recipients tab there is a Copy Emails button. This will copy all of the selected recipient email addresses to your clipboard. You can then paste to your Gmail To field. Use this sparingly as it will be charged against our daily Gmail usage quota. 

Getting Help

There are additional features and enhancements to PTP and they are continuously adding more with major updates. Click on the question mark symbol in the upper right to access help features. Selecting Getting Started will display the Welcome information that was displayed the first time you opened the new version. There are some basic labels of features, videos, and additional information. Selecting What's New? will show a list of the key enhancements along with a What's New video. Selecting Help will take you to the live PowerTeacher Pro help site. This site provides detailed information on most aspects of PTP.