Thou shalt not use stuff the Wrong Way

Powerschool is a student information system (SIS). It makes administrating your school easier. Part of powerschool is something called power teacher.  Powerteacher is web-based gradebook, that looks like it doesn’t completely suck.

Moodle is a learning management system. Moodle is designed to support online learning, blended learning and stuff like that. Moodle also has a gradebook, which looks like IT doesn’t suck.

Now.

The easy thing about powerschool (and powerteacher) is your students, teachers, and courses are all linked together, in one big happy family. However, powerteacher isn’t a learning management system. It’s a good gradebook.  We shouldn’t use moodle as a student information system, and we shouldn’t use powerteacher as a learning management system.

On 15 July 2009, Tom Hoffman inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

Yeah, we’re just getting into this issue in depth with SchoolTool.  We’ve actually got some funding, or more accurately, a school has some funding which they’re using to modify SchoolTool to interoperate nicely with Moodle to keep these roles separate the way they want.  In the design process I finally got a much clearer idea about the difference between the way an LMS looks at the world and how a SIS does.