Checking grades in high school can be difficult for many reasons. Grades are put into a grade book that is forbidden for students to see, but there are websites on which teachers can upload grades. The Student Parent Access Network (SPAN) was a website used to check grades, look at schedules, and check attendance. The new replacement for SPAN, PowerSchool, is very different and difficult compared to SPAN for many reasons.
SPAN was an easy way to get on to check grades at home on the computer. During this summer Span was shut down and replaced. It was shut down at a very inconvenient time, right at the end of summer when people were checking for their schedules. So going to school the first day was more stressful than a normal first day, if that is possible. Few people knew their schedules, unless they came in during the summer to change them, so everyone had to wait until homeroom to receive their schedules. When a student receives their schedule it is not exactly what they want which can cause a long line at the attendance office.
The replacement grading website is PowerSchool. PowerSchool has an app for smart phones which makes it easier to access. But PowerSchool is a very difficult website with which to work because it keeps track of all the classes students have taken during the school year and all of their grades. This causes students to struggle sorting through grades to find the grade they originally wanted to view. SPAN was a very straight forward website with many good tabs that had a lot of information that was easy to find. PowerSchool is confusing and clustered. Maybe when SPAN was first created it was difficult to use, but when first using SPAN there was not struggle compared to the struggle with PowerSchool. Overall both websites are helpful when students need to check grades, but it is hard to get used to a new website after seeing the same one for the past three years. A solution to this problem would be to make sure you spend time working with Powerschool to get used to it. Also at school people from the office could set aside one day at the beginning of the year to show students how to use PowerSchool during lunch.
