PowerSchool Unified Classroom Reviews & Product Details

Unified Classroom links with our PowerSchool Gradebook Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is always going down. There hasn't been a week this entire school year when it didn't go down for a period of time. Today it's been down for over 5 hours. How do you teach when it doesn't work? The interface is hard to use. There is so much confusion between Unified Classroom Assignments and class pages. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that everything is in one-grades, attendance, etc. the software makes everything very easy. You can even put in pictures of the students. It keeps track of grades and calculates averages for you. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think the interface could be much more user friendly. While the software does almost everything, the interface lacks a lot. It isn’t very pretty and is hard to navigate at times. I think the grading portion needs the most work Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that powerschool allows me to have my roster and all pertinent information on my students in one convenient place. I have access to their phone numbers, addresses, identifying information, birthdays, and any other important information that I need to successfully run my classroom. I like that it has students organized in alphabetical order as well, so that students are easily found and accessible when looking in the grade book. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of using the program, which is great!! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike that you have to be connected to the internet/ online in order to access the information on PowerSchool. Due to the updates that they make, the server is known to be down sometimes which can be really frustrating when there is information that needs to be accessed immediately. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

PowerSchool is useful for Upper Elementary students because it incorporates discussion boards and class pages that allow them to interact with and take ownership over some of the course materials. This was especially helpful during distance learning (again, in the upper grades only) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Powerschool feels clunky to use in the lower grades. We like to mainly post pictures and short blurbs about the day, or announcements about upcoming events in the lower grades, and that can be hard to navigate, especially on the parent-facing side. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

GUI makes it easy to find what you need, screen is uncluttered Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Limited report capabilities, required sign in between screen change when you are looking up info for multiple students Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Our teachers like the Rubrics, PowerSchool Unified Assessment. Many are having good luck with PowerSchool Learning. For the things that are in UC, most are easy to find. The things that are integrated are good. PowerSchool is getting better about cleaning up the differences in formatting between software so that it is less obvious that different software is involved. Performance Matters is Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We are unable to customize almost anything. We have to do hacky things to get what we need in Unified Classroom - for example, mass disabling the web access to prevent students/parents from accessing the system while we're performing EOY... UC does not honor the disable parent portal checkbox unless the parent tries to access a PowerSchool parent portal page (non-UC). Then a lot of times things don't sync back to UC so we encounter random batches of parents who cannot see any/all of their kids and the reason is unclear because everything looks fine in the SIS. There is no way (at least on our side) to force a sync. Support just gives workarounds to change the setting and then change it back en masse... this is clunky at best.

UC lacks a lot of the most fundamental things a teacher needs. They cannot see other teachers' grades nor even take attendance without being bounced over to the PowerTeacher portal. All the bouncing between PTP/PowerTeacher/UC is very slow.

We have to manually integrate all of our staff, teachers, and students with Google-integrated PowerSchool IDs via CSV import files rather than automatically created based on settings in the SIS...even if we only need to add one--we can't even manually set one if it hasn't been set before. Staff have to choose Sign In With Google and if they accidentally choose Sign In With Microsoft, it's difficult to get it back to Google. We get tickets all the time from teachers that do this. Would be better if PowerSchool would just ask for the e-mail (no password) upfront and then redirect them to the proper place based on type of PowerSchool ID on the next screen... instead of having to choose Sign In With (anything).

While some things are easier, other things are harder than they should be. Teachers cannot even access settings for their gradebook anymore. The (formerly) charm bar option for Settings is just gone and wasn't made available elsewhere as far as we can find. They cannot see section numbers in their class picker so identifying a section when multiple have the same expression is difficult at best.

PowerSchool Learning is very clunky at the end/start of each term having to swap master classes around.

We have no masquerade option for teachers in UC. No test server option.

We have no access to the UC database and PowerSchool repeatedly refuses to share information we have asked for-- for example, we wanted a list of all parents who had successfully integrated with UC, who had not, and how often parents are using UC. We cannot see any of this and they won't export that data for us to see. We used to have this kind of reporting available to us in the SIS but we can only use it if parents find their way to the old parent portal.

The PowerSchool mobile app is not compatible with UC and it confuses parents. When they need to set their own password from an admin-set password, they get taken in a mobile browser to UC and things are just clunky from there.

We find that some grades entered in PowerSchool Learning do not show up as assignments in Unified Classroom even though the assignments show in the Scoresheet in the PowerTeacher Pro gradebook.

Staff that have both admin and teacher accounts have trouble if they happened to log into one or the other and then try to access screens expecting the one they didn't log into. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I believe the most helpful portion of the training is either the Q&A or the practical information. I have been through this training a few times now and I really enjoyed this last presenter allowing us to use our own classrooms, instead of the training classrooms. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My least favorite part of this training is when we have to use the Test Classroom to practice all of these tasks. The ability for me to retain and utilize this information is much higher if I am not doing everything on a "fake" location. We are teachers. When we make assessments or create assignments, we do it for a reason; even if it takes place during a training. When I can use my own classroom and go through the steps with my real roster, I grasp the material 10x better and faster. There is always a delete button if I do something I did not mean to. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Learning pages are easy to use and manage. It is an essential piece of any LMS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are too many tools or applications that are buried. It takes too many steps to get to my Learning pages. The connection from Unified dashboard to my previous work is not intuitive at all. I should be able to access my pages from the dashboard with one click. The calendar in Unified is not connected to the Learning pages calendar. Why can't these be connected. I like the Learning Pages gradebook better than the Unified grade book. It is easier to use and understand. The Unified grading does not allow for me to edit standards or easily set up a standards based gradebook. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We love the general look and feel of the UC dashboard for teachers. With the latest modifications, it makes a lot more sense now to teachers. Class pages and Assessment can really bring everything together, when things work well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The inability to have a parent smartphone app to 'message' / chat teachers is a huge disappointment. The inability to customize UC, which is what makes PS so great, is very frustrating. UC still forces teachers and parents to go to the 'old portal' way too often. Too many tasks are still not "ported over". PS has been pushing unlimited contacts, which our district has moved to, but in UC, there is basically no real support for unlimited contacts. So quick rosters, etc reports are essentially useless for us. In the chat/message system, if a parent doesn't have an account, we should not be able to send them a message. It should gray out the parent or throw an error stating "no account found linked to parent/guardian". Mass creating parent accounts for UC is still super time consuming. Supposedly in November its going to get significantly better, but I've been told that before. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.