Having to go back and forth between Google Classroom for schoolwork, Powerschool for grades, and various websites for other homework can be annoying. The Wauwatosa School District is implementing a new system called Infinite Campus before the 2019-2020 school year to replace the current system, Powerschool. It will essentially be like Google Classroom and Powerschool combined into one website.

Infinite Campus will allow information regarding attendence, grades, and assignments to be in one location. The switch to infinite campus will be beneficial to the district. Infinite Campus offers more features than Powerschool does. One of these features is more advanced, smoother data.

“The consistency and cleanliness that we need in the data we cannot necessarily achieve with the systems we are using today,” says District Technology Coordinator Jamie Price in his presentation to the school board.

There can be issues with the data in Powerschool, such as having a substitute put in the wrong data. These errors are then hard to correct. It can additionally be difficult to determine who entered data. This is especially unhelpful in situations where it’s important to find who entered what data and when or who changed the data.

“We need to wrap accountability and some sort of ordered mechanism into the system,” Price says.

Another benefit of Infinite Campus is that it is single sourced. The company managing it only runs Infinite Campus. Whereas Powerschool, being a bigger company, makes and runs other apps, which can result in glitches.  

A substantial upside to Infinite campus is how it works for students and teachers. Students will no longer have to go to Google Classroom for one class, Power Workspace for another, or Moodle for an additional class. With infinite campus, all of the resources and information the students need are in one place.

According to Price, in the current system a teacher creates as assignment and they create that assignment in Powerschool. However, the actual assignment can’t be found in Powerschool. Students must go to another place to actually find or complete the assignment.

“Right now, the way it works is really inefficient,” Price said describing the current system.

The current system requires the teacher to look at the work turned in, and put the grade into an entirely separate system. According to Price, with Infinite Campus the teacher can create the assignment in Infinite Campus and the student can go there and complete the assignment. When the teacher grades it, they can grade it from within Infinite Campus.

Infinite Campus will also be easier for parents to use.

“We also want to put into the hands of parents within reason and within acceptable boundaries the ability to update their information in an easier manner than what they can do today,” Price said.

There will be a slight increase in costs for the district related to changing the system, but the positives of Infinite Campus appear to outweigh the negatives in the eyes of the district.