Oh how the summer is heating up.
Some venture capital company bought PowerSchool.
The next major version of PowerSchool (version 9.0) has been released.
And I'm trying to sell/buy a house (a gigantic pain if you've never had the displeasure).

In the midst of all this, I built a new plugin for PowerSchool I want to share with you.
It's called Today's Bus Notes. One of my schools asked if there was a better way for them to collect all the temporary transportation changes.
Past practice: Each classroom would send a student down to the office each morning with "bus notes" like "Johnny will be walking today", "Susie will be taking bus 2 and getting off at Pretend St. for the rest of the week", etc. Then the office would compile and make copies of these notes for people on bus duty and drivers.
Current practice: Each teacher enters these bus notes into PS much like lunch counts. Notes default to the current date, but they can span multiple days. Admins can also add notes via the transportation page. Then the office just prints today's notes via an report.

Even if this customization does not apply to your school/district, I urge you to have a look at how it's setup if your interesting in using 1-many database extensions without the tlist_child tag.

Oh, and I got approved to attend PSU in Washington DC July 26-30!!!
Drop me a line if your a fellow attendee!

It's Spring! Birds chirping, flowers blooming... and another round of PARCC (queue sad trombone).

But hey, I've updated this PARCC student screen I came up with for PowerSchool. It uses the standard Illinois state fields (now that they exist). And will do some form validation like "If Large Print is checked, test format must be paper", and "If ELA Text-to-Speech is Yes, ELA Human Reader or Human Signer must be none."

Yes I know Pearson came out with their own PARCC state screen. This one is better!
That's why I'm calling it "PARCCtastic"

If you answered yes to both questions, then come see me present at the PSUG-MW Conference in Michigan City, IN. I'll be laying it out in two sessions:
Setting up and using built-in data validation - Beginner
and
Roll your own data validation using javascript - Advanced