Q: I teach several sections of the same class, do I have to duplicate my work in PowerSchool Learning?
A: If you teach several sections of the same class, PowerSchool Learning can save you time by letting you share the content (Pages, Assignments, etc) between all sections of your class. This feature is called Roster Sections.
Please note: Students can only belong to one Roster Section in your class at any given time.
What are Roster Sections & Why should I use them?
In short, you'll manually create one central class in PowerSchool Learning that contains all of the content that you want to make available to your students. From that central class you can link Roster Sections to the classes that contain rosters imported from your school's Student Information System (SIS). This way, students from any of section can visit the central class, participating in activities just for their roster section, or across all sections.
Example and Instructions
Classes with multiple sections are initially imported as separate classes in PowerSchool Learning. For example, let us say you are teaching two sections of Biology 101. When imported from your SIS, you'll see "Biology 101-1" and "Biology 101-2" in PowerSchool Learning. This gives you the flexibility to create completely different content for your sections, if desired.
However, if you plan to share content between your sections, you'll need to manually create a new, central class in PowerSchool Learning. Let's call this class "Biology 101." Read more: Creating a new Class
Next, we'll link from your "Biology 101" roster to the two imported class rosters.
- Click the Manage Class menu in your Biology 101 class and select Edit Roster option.
- From the Students tab click the Create Sections button.
- We'll link Section A of Biology 101 to the Biology 101-1 roster by clicking by Import Students button.
- While the Import from another Roster option is selected, search for your Biology 101-1 class, and when you find it, click the Import button.
- You'll see a list of the students imported from the SIS. If it looks right, click the Import Students button to finish the process.
Repeat steps 2-4. This time the "Create Sections" button in step two will be Manage Sections, where you can now add a "Section B" to import the Biology 101-2 roster through, and so on.
That's all there is to it. Add your content to the Biology 101 class, and when you make that class Active students in each roster section will be able to participate. You can leave the classes that were created for each section inactive (e.g. the "Biology 101-1" class) as they don't contain any content for students to interact with. If your SIS updates the roster of any of sections, those changes will automatically apply to the appropriate roster section in your central "Biology 101" class.
In addition to sharing content between all sections of your Roster, PowerSchool Learning also allows you to set different due dates for each section. This way, you can create a single Assignment, Discussion, or Exam in PowerSchool Learning while still enforcing the appropriate due dates for classes whose sections meet on different days.
