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PowerSchool SMS 8.0
Administration Manual
Build: 5/26/2015
This document is a reference for the user of
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| = | School Administrator: Maintains the PowerSchool SMS system for one or more schools in the same district. This involves such tasks as scheduling courses and classes, configuring grading, enrolling students, assigning teachers, validating addresses, tracking immunizations, adjusting student information, and assembling student information for various administrative purposes. A School Administrator may do this work for more than one school. Typical School Administrators hold such positions as school IT manager, vice-principal, office data specialist. See also Base roles [>>]. |
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Note: This document may describe some tasks, processes, and features that are not available to your role [>>].
This section describes new capabilities in PowerSchool SMS 8.0.
User interface
| = | The PowerSchool SMS interface has new colors [Figure 6], an altered layout, and a more efficient menu system. |
| = | PowerSchool SMS uses color to distinguish more clearly the Active Calendar from the Planning Calendar [>>]. |
User roles
| = | You can change to another role more easily [>>]. |
Course requests
| = | The School Administrator can specify which of a student's contacts can approve that student's course requests [Table 13]. |
School setup
| = | You can change calendars more easily [>>]. |
Registration and enrollment
| = | The process of registering and enrolling a student is more streamlined. As part of the process, PowerSchool SMS scans the system for potential duplicate students [>>] and you can assign contacts to the registrant. |
| = | When you try to enroll a student who has behavior enrollment restrictions, PowerSchool SMS prevents the enrollments and displays a warning. |
| = | When you try to enroll a student who is under the minimum age, PowerSchool SMS displays a warning. |
| = | When you try to enroll a student in an out-of-zone school or in a school where program management is employed, PowerSchool SMS sets the enrollment to "pending" [>>]. |
| = | Rather than transferring a student mid-year by selecting Transfer Students from the Actions menu, you withdraw the student from one school and enroll that student in the other [>>]. |
| = | You can view and manage a student's enrollments more efficiently [Figure 86]. |
| = | A District Administrator can specify which fields are required and add custom fields [>>]. |
| = | For District Setup purposes, PowerSchool SMS provides a dedicated Registration and Enrollment preferences page [>>]. |
| = | PowerSchool SMS stores enrollment data as records with start and end dates (rather than as a collection of status codes). |
| = | New permissions control aspects of registration and enrollment: Add Students permission [>>], Delete Student from district permission [>>], Registration and Enrollment Preferences permission [>>]. |
Contacts
| = | PowerSchool SMS displays more information about contacts [Table 13] [>>] [>>]. Information displayed includes each student's emergency contact, communication methods, pickup rights, custody, and course request approval status. |
| = | For a contact, you can record new information, including new communication methods such as an e-mail address and a Facebook URL, a permission-to-pick-up phrase, and the nature of the contact's relationship with the student [>>]. |
| = | You can click a contact's e-mail address to start composing an e-mail. |
| = | You can link a student's sibling to that student as a contact [>>]. |
| = | You can link any contact stored on the system to a student as a contact [>>]. |
| = | When adding a contact to a student, PowerSchool SMS identifies potential duplicates [>>]. |
| = | You need record a student contact only once and then it is available to associate with more than one student [>>]. |
| = | When you record a new contact, PowerSchool SMS scans the system for potential duplicates [>>]. |
Scheduling
| = | The School Administrator can see which user made a change to a student's schedule []. |
Product name change
| = | For version 8.0, the product name Chancery SMS is changed to PowerSchool SMS. Since references to Chancery SMS might persist in the product or these documents, the reader should consider these names equivalent. |
Server support
| = | For its Web and Database Servers, PowerSchool SMS now supports Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit [>>]. |
Note: The ability to run Year-End Processing [>>] is not available in this version of PowerSchool SMS.
This section describes new capabilities in Chancery SMS7.7.
Online course requests
Using ParentCONNECTxp™ 4.0, Pearson's parent/student web site, a student can request courses for the coming year [>>]. Also in ParentCONNECTxp, the student's parent or guardian can review and approve the student's online course requests, if such approval is required [>>]. In PowerSchool SMS:
| = | A student's teacher or a counselor can make course recommendations for a student [>>]. |
| = | The administrator or school scheduler can view course request and view who made each recommendation [>>]. |
| = | The administrator can require parent/guardian or counselor approval of a student's online course requests, define periods when requests will be accepted, and enable a student to override grade-level recommendations [>>]. |
| = | Online course requests and recommendations are automatically logged [>>]. |
| = | A revised Student Academic Plan Progress report [>>] enables a student and a parent/guardian to view his or her academic plan in ParentConnectXP. |
Academic Planner
| = | When searching for courses to add to an academic plan [>>], the administrator can search within previous search results. |
Attendance
| = | On the My Classes page, PowerSchool SMS displays only the classes for which the logged in teacher is the active teacher [>>]. |
| = | Using the Change Reason for Submitted Attendance permission [>>], the administrator can control the user's requirement to enter a reason for any change to a submitted attendance code. PowerSchool SMS logs change reasons entered [>>]. |
Grading
| = | You can enter a student's grade for a class in a previous grading period [>>]; that is, a grading period that occurred before the student was scheduled into the class. |
Reports
| = | An upgraded Report Package [>>]. |
| = | The new Student Online Course Request Status report lists a secondary school’s students according to their online course request status [>>]. |
| = | The new Student Recommended Courses Verification report lists a secondary school’s students who have one or more courses recommended to them [>>]. |
Scheduling
| = | A teacher can view a student's Schedule page, and link to it directly from a class roster [>>]. |
This section describes the capabilities new in Chancery SMS 7.6.2.
Attendance
The District Administrator can force a user role to record a reason for any change to a submitted attendance code [>>].
Academic Planner
The Short name entered on the Academic Plan Setup page remains unique when additional plan versions are created, enabling district administrators to create an academic plan with a set of plan versions related to that academic plan. Districts are no longer required to set up individual academic plans for each plan version [>>].
Grading
School administrators can enter a student's grades for a grading period that occurred before the student was scheduled into the class [>>].
Log on
There is a new logon page in PowerSchool SMS7.6 [>>]. This page functions in the same manner as the previous logon page but is named "Sign in".
Permanent Record
For cumulative GPA definitions with included/excluded courses where a historical course is subsequently manually added, the new historical course is automatically included in the calculation regardless of the case in the course number.
For the Academic Planner set up and its student credit calculations, each course number is still considered unique.
| = | The "Change Reason for Submitted Attendance" permission controls whether users are required to enter a change reason for any change to a submitted attendance code [>>]. |
| = | Access to the Social security # field on the Overview tab of the Student Demographics and the Staff Demographics pages is controlled by a new "Access to SSN" permission [>>]. |
| = | There is a new Backfill Grades permission that controls the user's ability to enter grades for a class in a past grading period [>>]. |
| = | There is a new Delete Teacher Assignment permission that controls users' ability to delete teacher class assignments [>>]. |
Reports Framework
Report writers can use special characters and spaces in column names.
Scheduling
| = | On the Master Schedule and Class Setup pages, school administrators can schedule more than three teachers into a class, indicate what role each teacher played in the classroom, and view a history of teachers assigned to the class. For further information, refer to the Managing Teacher Class Assignments Technical Bulletin. Withdrawn students are no longer included in the Homeroom count. |
| = | The Classes and Homerooms pages display the number of active students in the class. For details, refer to the Chancery SMS 7.6.0 Release Notes. |
Student Behavior
On the Student Behavior page users can search the Student Number field, located in the "Most Frequent" category in the Basic and Detail search page [>>]. The search operators are: "Contains", "Starts with", "Ends with" and "Equals".
If in the course of your work, you need information on some aspect of the system, you can get that information quickly. You can get detailed information on PowerSchool SMS in general or access to a user support web site.
To get information on the page currently displayed:
| 1 | On the page, click the Help menu. |
| 2 | Click Dynamic Help. The relevant page in the PowerSchool SMS 8.0 eDocs appears in your web browser. |
To get information on PowerSchool SMS in general:
| 1 | On any page, click the Help menu. |
| 2 | Click Contents. PowerSchool SMS 8.0 eDocs appears in your web browser. |
| = | You can find specific information using the table of contents or index, or by text search. |
| = | Some documents require the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader (http://get.adobe.com/reader). |
To view the user support site:
| 1 | On any page, click the Help menu. |
| 2 | Click Support Website.... The login page opens in your web browser. |
| = | For access to https://support.powerschool.com, you must have a User ID and Password issued by your organization. The User ID determines the services to which you have access. |
For assistance with technical aspects of a district's PowerSchool SMS system, such as installation
As a further source of assistance, we offer several user support options, which are available by subscription (that is, to personnel within an organization that has a support agreement with us in place). Options include access to a technical support engineer and access to our user support site: https://support.powerschool.com. The support site contains information and services such as a knowledge base, user forums, technical bulletins, downloads, documentation for older PowerSchool SMS versions, and tracking of support incidents set up by support technicians.
To consult a support technical support engineer:
Telephone 866-434-6276.
| = | Telephone service is available Monday to Friday, between 5 am and 5 pm Pacific Time. |
| = | Or email psstechsupp@pearson.com |
For the District Administrator or Technician, training may be an appropriate means of learning how to work with a PowerSchool SMS system. Experienced users interested in mastering new aspects of a system may also benefit from in-depth information and proven techniques that training provides.
Training programs on PowerSchool SMS are available from Pearson in several formats, including on-site and live online. Also available is custom training designed for a specific district's system.
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Copyright 1998-2012, Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliate(s). All rights reserved. Powerschool SMS is a registered trademark of Pearson Education, Inc. All trademarks that are not owned or licensed by Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliates, are the property of their respective owners.
Pearson
Always Learning
www.pearsonschoolsystems.com
Tel: 866-434-6276
Email: psstechsupp@pearson.com
