Pearson School Systems, also referred to as Pearson Education, has reportedly announced that Spokane School District 81 in Washington has selected its student data management solution ‘PowerSchool Premier’ as its new Web based Student Information System for implementation by the 2010 school year. The new system will support 52 schools and special programs and approximately 30,000 students across the district.

School officials said the existing application, Schools Administrative Student Information (SASI) System that was also developed Pearson, was outdated in terms of handling the current demand for interlinked Internet, broadband, and Wi-B technologies. Consumers, service providers and companies want simultaneous high definition video streaming, unified communications, Web 2.0 social networks, infrastructural virtualization, Web-based Software as a Solution applications, network operations center offloading, remote backup and super quick environments for cloud computing.

"After a 16-month process of researching different vendor solutions and surveying what other school districts in Washington were deploying, we chose PowerSchool Premier as the best replacement option for SASI," said Ken Brown, executive director of technology for Pearson School System, in a statement. "PowerSchool offers the features and functions that the district needed alongside the best combination of web-based ease-of-use, adherence to standards, depth of support for customization, and the lowest cost."

Pearson said that the new solution is capable of handling all of the above stated requirements with negligible latency during dual direction Web-based communication and information request, and is still able to deliver all the features of SASI, which provided administrators and educators with access to student demographics, attendance performance, time-tables, exam dates, holiday information, discipline history, grades, test score trace-back, state reporting codes, SASIxp, Integrade Pro, classroomXP, and parent access.

Officials said that Spokane offcials checked out PowerSchool Premier real time usage by schools that currently use it in Washington district itself such as Mead, Pasco, Kennewick, Richland, Sunnyside, Peninsula, and Central Kitsap. Recently Milton-Union School District in West Milton, Ohio, selected the solution for implementation by fall 2009 to support nearly 100 teachers and more than 1640 students.

"We were also pleased with Pearson's approach to project planning, training and implementation support services, and continued support for standards-based grading, assessments, and reporting," Brown said.

Earlier this year, Antelope Valley Union High School District in California reportedly selected Pearson’s’s PowerSchool Premier as its student data management solution.  The system, which will be launched this fall, will support 13 high schools and nearly 24,000 students, TMCnet reported.

The solution will interconnect public schools across the district, and allows up to date information that staff, teachers and students alike can selectively access, based on pre-assigned permissions, from anywhere on this planet provided they have an internet connection and remember their usernames and passwords, and helps teachers to focus more on their main job of educating students rather than being dragged into administrative time wasting activities with one time only entry methods.

The explosion and extraordinary popularity of wired and wireless broadband and all related technologies, and the far reaching environmental impact, with potentially everything going digital and on-line, could be saving trees by not printing documents and books. Other positive fallouts could be the gradual switch in schools and other educational institutions to go broadband and maybe then children will then not have to carry back-breaking books.

Officials at Pearson claim that the solution allows district end-users to store data in one location and seamlessly generate attendance records, grade checks, report cards and transcripts, because it has a centralized, web-based infrastructure, and add that PowerSchool Premier has an extensible designed architecture, which can accommodate more rules, regulations and members without any significant additional investment.

"With the right technology infrastructure, educators can make timely, strategic decisions about student performance based on quick and easy access to data," said Paul Fletcher, president of the School Systems group of Pearson, in a statement. "By selecting PowerSchool now, [the Spokane School District] can create an open, integrated solution that enables the district to adapt to the ever-evolving technology landscape of the 21st century."

In terms of Web based schooling solutions, a survey of technology leaders for kindergarten through to grade 12 educational institutions at the 2009 Consortium of School Networking Conference mainly unearthed that 80 percent of respondents were interested in desktop virtualization as an implementable solution in school classrooms.

The survey also indicated more than 45 percent of respondents wanted delivery of applications and resources to the right students at the right time; more than 43 percent desired simple delivery of semester, quarter or course-based instructional applications and resources; and, 42 percent of respondents demanded reduction of IT costs by extending the lifecycle of existing hardware; and, 42 percent preferred if IT personnel had more time to work on other projects.

TMCnet has also projected how education could ultimately leverage cloud computing and reported that teachers in third world countries could possibly access UNICEF hosted class-room lectures without having to carry too many books, or storing info on the schools’ server and network.

Pearson official said that since the Spokane district has been its customer for more than 10 years, it automatically qualified for Pearson's SASI Customer First Program, which is designed to reward the loyalty of Pearson's long-term SASI customers by providing them with an updated technology infrastructure – example, PowerSchool Premier - that can grow alongside their student information management needs now and well into the future.

comments powered by Disqus