jtreadwell's blog

Power Data Solutions is back online

Submitted by jtreadwell on Thu, 06/17/2010 - 4:33pm

News Aggregator

Submitted by jtreadwell on Thu, 06/03/2010 - 1:31pm

I was bored the other day and avoiding doing more last minute state reporting work (thanks a lot NYS BOE) so I started playing with the site and found some stuff we hadn't played with yet. One of the things was a news aggregator. I'm not sure how useful it will be, but it was worth a shot so i have enabled it and started it off with 5 feeds. If you have any feed suggestions let us know and we'll try to add them in.

PDS Socialization

Submitted by jtreadwell on Wed, 05/26/2010 - 12:41pm

Power Data Solutions felt like we needed to join the social world before we get too far behind (and someone stole our name or something) so we created a facebook page and a twitter page. On facebook we are Power Data Solutions (real original) and on twitter we are pdstweets. We're still learning how to do this but hopefully this will add ways for you to find out what we are up to as we continue to develop customizations and services to help schools work the best that they can.

Exciting Development

Submitted by jtreadwell on Mon, 05/03/2010 - 11:32pm

Power Data Solutions is very excited to tell you about the latest developments. Many of us were saddened by the announcement that Matt Freund was going to be moving away from doing PowerSchool work. Well we at Power Data Solutions couldn't just stand by and let one of the best PowerSchool resources walk away without a fight. So today we are announcing the Un-Retirement of Matt Freund. Matt has agreed to continue his work helping make schools successful by joining Power Data Solutions full time!

Tlist_sql errors

Submitted by jtreadwell on Tue, 11/03/2009 - 2:51pm

We've been getting a lot of questions about many of the reports found here and why they don't work. Almost every question has the same answer so I thought I'd post it on the main page.

IE Woes

Submitted by jtreadwell on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 10:53pm

So I'm sitting here at home wasting yet another night trying to reprogram a page I made for someone for the users who work on IE 7 or IE 8. I spend many nights a week doing nothing productive, just reworking existing customizations to get them to work with Internet Exploder. Tonight I think I'm about to get violent. According to everything I can find there is a problem that started with IE 7 (shocking, I know) where a reference to getElementById actually looks for the name attribute, not the ID attribute. So for example lets say we have 2 input boxes:

Reports bundle update

Submitted by jtreadwell on Fri, 10/16/2009 - 4:34pm

A update to the reports bundle has been released. The new bundle includes some important upgrades:

  1. New report to help schools detect H1N1 outbreaks via comments (many other uses as well)
  2. Addressed the report size issue using 3 additional include files. All reports have been updated to use new includes
  3. New report has version information at the bottom per user suggestion.

Browser Wars - New information

Submitted by jtreadwell on Thu, 10/15/2009 - 10:47am

I was just made aware of a page that has statistics on browser performance. Without any other comment, here is the link:

I was just made aware of a page that has statistics on browser performance

Do with it what you will.

Jason

NO!!!! DON'T GO TO 6.0.1.3

Submitted by jtreadwell on Tue, 10/13/2009 - 2:24pm

Don't go to 6.0.1.3!!! Pearson has just pulled it off their support site. I was just playing on my test server trying to run a report and I continue to get the errors I was getting on 6.0.1. Readers of the previous post may have noticed that Bob and other users having worse problems.

I am officially removing my endorsement of 6.0.1.3. See, this is why I normally wait and test on my test server for a week or two before upgrading. And now that we are still in a panic we'll still need to upgrade as soon as the next fix comes out. Fun for us all!

Jason

PowerSchool 6.0.1.3

Submitted by jtreadwell on Mon, 10/12/2009 - 3:03pm

Speaking on behalf of a school that has had major problems with the 6.0.x line of releases I'm happy to say that after some testing (not a lot, but we are in emergency mode) all issues we've been having seem to be resolved in the 6.0.1.3 release that came out on October 10th.

Reports by the Bundle

Submitted by jtreadwell on Fri, 10/02/2009 - 11:34am

A few days ago PDS released its first ever bundle. The Custom Reports Bundle contains MANY of the reports you can find on PDS as well as new tabs for PowerSchool 6's tabbed reports page and some changes to the reports you already used. Several new reports were also added that can not yet be found anywhere else and some new dashboards are available that are still in experimental phases. We'd love to hear your feedback on this.

Browser Wars

Submitted by jtreadwell on Tue, 09/01/2009 - 9:05pm

So normally the browser wars consist of IE vs. Firefox or IE vs. Safari. While I personally don't see any positive benefit in IE over any other browser, and find many negatives as I reprogram specifically for IE all the time, I get that people like IE and many people don't like change. Fine.

What's Missing?

Submitted by jtreadwell on Thu, 06/18/2009 - 5:02pm

PowerDataSolutions has added a new poll looking for what you think is missing from PowerSchool. The poll only gives you 5 options and no write in options so don't get too excited, but we would really like to know what you thought should be priorities. A link to the poll is below.

Go to Poll

In unrelated news:

PSUG-NE August 3rd - 5th

Submitted by jtreadwell on Mon, 05/11/2009 - 1:58pm

PSUG-NE Summer information Exchange 2009 has been announced and will be hosted by PSUG user Bob Cornacchioli's district just outside of Worchester, MA. All PowerSchool users are invited and encouraged to attend.

This 3 day conference is not intended as a replacement for PowerSchool University. However for those schools that can not afford to send people 1/2 way across the country there is a local alternative (local if you are in the North East United States). Classes will be taught by fellow PowerSchool users including some names you'll recognize from PSUG and PowerDataSolutions.org.

PDS Recommends: Teacher Charts

Submitted by jtreadwell on Tue, 04/14/2009 - 12:17pm

Teachers spend a lot of time entering in grade information and don't see a whole lot of information regarding what they entered other than the mean, median and mode for the section. If the data were in excel then they could chart the data and see how the class was doing but that's repeating what they already did and is a lot of extra work setting up the charts for each assignment. If only there was a easy way...

PDS Recommends: Refresh Report Queue

Submitted by jtreadwell on Mon, 03/30/2009 - 1:46pm

PowerSchool's report queue is nice but large reports can make using the queue tedious. Refreshing the queue is a manual process that requires the user to click a link over and over again waiting for the report to finish. Each time the user refreshes the system has to reproduce the entire page again for the user. There is a better way.

Patience

Submitted by jtreadwell on Mon, 02/02/2009 - 1:43pm

Hello everyone. I know it's been a long time since I've posted. I've honestly stayed away from PDS for a few months. I know in my absence some other PDS members stepped up and helped people out so hopefully everyone got help when they needed it. I'm writing now to ask for a little more patience. There are some new things coming down the line but for reasons I can't get into they will be held back until sometime in March. The team is still going to be checking the site occasionally and will try to help where we can, but there won't be any major updates for a little while longer.

PowerDataSolutions is 1 year old!

Submitted by jtreadwell on Wed, 10/15/2008 - 9:27am

PowerDataSolutions (PDS) is officially 1 year old now! It's hard to believe its already been a year. So much has happened in the past 12 months and those of us contributing to PDS would like to thank everyone for their support and patience as we work to get more and more content out to you. Over the past year:

- PDS was created with a basic layout
- Contributors were added to the site
- The site layout was modified
- Pearson moved to Oracle
- PDS released 100s of versions of customizations
- PDS tried to catch up with Oracle
- PDS teamed up with Creative Breakthroughs

FINALLY!

Submitted by jtreadwell on Wed, 09/17/2008 - 12:02pm

Finally the verification pages for Oracle are here!! It took a long time to work out all the kinks but they are finally here, they work, and they are FAST! Now be patient, its a very complicated set of pages and I may have missed something in the initial release, but if so I can grab a missing file and place it into the customization pretty quickly.

Please let me know if you find any problems.

Jason

Grade Verification Package v 3.0

Verification pages customized for Oracle

Submitted by jtreadwell on Tue, 09/16/2008 - 11:06pm

They are sooooo close. I have converted the latest pages to be optimized for Oracle. I'll post them exclusively on PDS as soon as I have tested the last few pages. This means it may be as early as tomorrow morning (9/17/08) and you could have fixed Verification pages.

As I mentioned, the hold up is now only some final testing, however I would appreciate any feedback if something doesn't work in your setups. I only can test on a few different systems so there may be scenarios that I missed. I believe that it will work for all, but only live testing will truly test that.

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