Great Disappointment - Instability with Service Outages

Submitted 1 year ago
Tobin S.
Tobin S.
Teacher
Harbor Creek School District
Harborcreek PA, US
My Rating
Pedagogy
Supports

My Take

If you are not a technically adept person who is not motivated to develop their own content, this isn't for you. Also, if Schoology doesn't overcome the service reliability issues I would not recommend it. I am extremely frustrated and disappointed after creating material for 3 entire levels on this software. As for PowerSchool, if you are a decision-maker, avoid it at all costs. Older grading programs I used had more features, capability and reliability than PowerSchool.

How I Use It

After some initial problems with the product due to service outages after schools shut down across the US in Spring 2020, the product was great. Most of those outages occurred for those of us on the East Coast when West Coast Schools came online. They increased server capacity and Schoology stabilized. I developed online content for all my classes and went 100% paperless with Schoology. However, one year later, we are back to inexplicable complete shutdowns that occur after noon Eastern Time. A message Temporarily Unavailable comes up with a status page link with total fabrications claiming everything is working fine. There is no teacher user support whatsoever. I suspect the company has reduced server capacity to save money as schools return to regular schedule and decrease use of SMS software. This year my district unfortunately adopted the PowerSchool grading system as well, which is a complete disaster. There is little to no functionality, no tutorials or help files and the product does import properly from Schoology, which is the company's own software. Some aspects of the programming seem to lack capabilities you would expect in a basic spreadsheet program. It also improperly imports dates and transposes numbers, which indicate serious underlying programming issues.

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