PowerTeacher Pro

Teachers use the Teacher portal to take attendance, enter grades, access student data, access contact data, and many other tasks.

As soon as teachers take attendance, student attendance information is available to school administrators, parents, guardians, and students. Even if all of the students are present, a teacher must still take attendance. Submitting the attendance page tells PowerSchool SIS that a teacher has taken attendance.

Monitoring Attendance Status

• An empty indicator means that attendance has not been taken.

• A green indicator means that attendance has been submitted.

• A yellow indicator means that this class spans two periods, both of which require attendance to be taken, and attendance has been taken for one of the periods.

Take Attendance

1. Select the Take Attendance icon

2. Choose an attendance code

3. Mark students absent or tardy

4. Click Submit

Taking Multi-Day Attendance

Take Attendance By Track

Use the Group By Track option to take single-day attendance in blended learning environments. Schools must define the student groups represented by tracks and assign students to tracks or choose to disable the Group By Track functionality. If your school uses the Group By Track option, select the toggle under Group By Track to turn on this option for your user account. This setting is stored for each user and will remain the same as your previous visit to the attendance page. To display the list of students grouped by last name, select the toggle again at any time.

When you enable the Group By Track option, students are grouped by their assigned tracks. Students not assigned to a track are listed in a group at the top. When a track is not in session and a student is assigned to that track, the words "off-track" will appear next to the student's name.

If your school uses PowerLunch, request meals on the Submit Lunch Counts page.

To access student pages:

1. On the Start Page, select the Student Information icon

2. Select a student’s name

3. Open the Select Screens menu and choose a student information page to review

4. To switch classes, select the name of the class from the Change Class list

Use the teacher portal to print reports created in PowerSchool SIS that are assigned to teachers for both classes and individual students.

Navigating The Gradebook

Teachers navigate to the gradebook directly through the teacher portal. The first time you navigate to the gradebook, a welcome message appears introducing some of the features.

Use the menus and toolbar to navigate PowerTeacher Pro.

At the top of the gradebook window, use the Class Selector menu to switch classes, to select all of your classes, or to access students in a class or student group. Use the Term menu in the upper-right corner of the gradebook window to switch terms. 

The main menu is the Navigation menu on the left and is divided into categories with similar tasks grouped together. Select each icon in the Navigation menu to explore the kinds of tasks you can complete in each category.

Although you can start using the gradebook without setting anything up, you should add descriptions of your classes and configure how information appears in your gradebook. You can also create assignment categories and edit grading preferences.

Customizing Class Names

The gradebook includes read-only details about each class, including the course name, course number, section number, period, term, start date, end date, and grade scale. You can add more items, such as a description or the syllabus, that will be visible in the PowerSchool SIS Student and Parent Portals, and in PowerSchool Mobile.

You can customize the name of the class if you prefer to use a name that is different from the course name. For example, if you teach multiple Biology classes, customize the names to be different from each other, such as Bio 1, Bio 2, and Bio 3. Custom class names only appear in your gradebook and are not visible to co-teachers, students, and parents.

Before you begin creating assignments, create categories in PowerTeacher Pro.

Creating Categories

Categories are classifications in which you group similar types of assignments. Examples of categories are homework, tests, and quizzes.

The PCSD SIS team may create categories for teachers to use. Teachers cannot delete district-created categories, but if school policy permits you to use your own, you can create additional categories. If you do not want to use district-created categories, you can make them inactive.

Set Up A Category

1. Select the Create icon → Category. 

2. On the Category tab, add basic category information.
   category name, indicator color, description, etc. 

3. Click Select Classes to make a category available to one, some, or all classes.
   For example, if you teach two lab sections, you can create a category for lab work assignments and make the category available for use in only those two sections. When you create assignments for other classes, the lab work category will not be present in the list of available categories.

4. Select the Assignment Defaults tab to indicate when assignments and scores in this category will appear to students and to add scoring details.
   When you set up a category, the assignments in that category are included in the final grade calculation by default.
   If you clear the Count in Final Grade check box for the category or an individual assignment, the scores will not count in the final grade.
   For example, you may want to keep track of pretest scores. In that case, you would create a category for pretest assignments that do not include the pretest scores in the final grade calculation.

Categories and Co Teachers

If two teachers share an assignment—where one might be the lead teacher for some sections and the other takes the lead for others—the way categories work can be different. When you create a category, it’s linked to the teacher’s record in the PowerSchool SIS database. For co-teaching pairs, that category is tied to the lead teacher’s record. So, if the co-teacher sets up a new assignment and picks a unique category of her own, PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook will actually ask her to select one of the lead teacher’s categories instead.

Score Types

PowerTeacher Pro has four different score types in the gradebook—points, percent, grade scale, or collected only. It's possible to use one score type for one category and a different type for another, but it’s best to choose one method and use it consistently when scoring assignments so that reviewing and analyzing student performance is easier. When using Schoology and assigning specific score types to a category or assignment, choose from the first two scoring options:

• Points – Record all scores as points
  Examples: 25 out of 25, 8 out of 10, 50 out of 100

• Percent – Record all scores as percentage values
  Examples: 100%, 80%, 50%

• Grade Scale – Record all scores as values from the grade scales
  Examples: A, B, F or 4, 3, 1

• Collected Only – Record all scores using the collected score indicator
  Example: ✅

Once you have set the way scores are to appear in each category, any assignment you create uses that format by default. You can change the default setting when you create individual assignments. Planning in advance for categories in general simplifies your gradebook work in the long term.

To review the categories that you and the district leaders have already created, select the View All tab when you are creating a category or access the same information by selecting Grading and choosing Categories. District-created categories are labeled with an icon shaped like a building. Also, use the View All tab to review the classes that are using each category and whether each category is active.

To edit a category that you created, select Grading and choose Categories. Select the Edit icon next to the category you want to modify. Make the necessary changes and select Save. You cannot edit the name, color, or description of district-created categories, but you can choose which courses to apply them to, change the scoring, and make them inactive if you are not using them in your gradebook.

Finally, use categories to compare how students perform in different kinds of assignments. Select Grading and choose Category Totals to review students’ final grades data, aggregated by category. To access additional metrics, select the Gear icon at the top of the page and then select Show Metrics to review the mean, median, and mode statistics.