PowerSchool Announces New Contextual AI Solutions, Personalized for Amplifying Student Engagement and Democratizing Data Access

PowerBuddy™ for Learning and PowerBuddy™ for Data Analysis address critical challenges in education including learning loss and chronic absenteeism ahead of the 2024-2025 school year

PowerSchool (NYSE: PWSC), the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America, announced today the general availability of its latest PowerSchool PowerBuddy™ AI products: PowerBuddy™ for Learning Student Assistant and PowerBuddy™ for Data Analysis. These innovative solutions are designed to enhance the educational experience and streamline data analysis, empowering students, educators, and administrators ahead of the 2024-2025 school year.

Founded on PowerSchool’s Responsible AI principles and piloted by school districts representing over 1.5 million students, this release builds on the successful launch of PowerBuddy for Learning teacher assistant in April. Now, the student assistant is available, providing personalized support to students, while PowerBuddy for Data Analysis pioneers a paradigm shift in how districts fulfill ad-hoc data requests to analyze and improve chronic absenteeism, student performance, enrollment, graduation rates, staffing needs, and more.

PowerBuddy for Learning: Personalizing Student Engagement and Performance

Embedded within the widely used PowerSchool Schoology Learning Management System, PowerBuddy for Learning is a safe and secure AI assistant that delivers individualized guidance to create the most meaningful, relevant, and engaging learning experience for students. Through conversational AI, PowerBuddy provides students with contextually relevant prompts tailored to their grade level, lesson content, and assignments, encouraging them to explore topics more deeply and ensure they receive the guidance and district and state standards-aligned resources they need in a way that best suits their personal learning style.

“PowerBuddy for Learning exemplifies the most practical and impactful at-scale deployment of personalized education for every student,” said Shivani Stumpf, Chief Product and Innovation Officer at PowerSchool. “By integrating seamlessly within PowerSchool Schoology, a platform used daily by millions of students, PowerBuddy meets each student where they are, provides the most relevant assistance aligned to what the student is learning, and the individualized support they need. This contextual awareness significantly increases engagement and accelerates the learning process, motivating students to achieve their highest potential and fully immerse themselves in their learning journey.”

Key Features of PowerBuddy for Learning:

• Personalized Assistance: By bringing AI to the district’s data, students receive tailored, contextualized support appropriate for their grade level, reading level, and their individual learning needs, all aligned with state and district standards.
• Intelligent Prompts: Aligned to the student’s individual needs, relevant prompts encourage students to explore topics, thoroughly enhancing their understanding and proficiency.
• Socratic Interactions: The Socratic method guides students towards discovering answers independently without providing them outright, fostering critical thinking and deeper understanding through active engagement in problem-solving and discovery. This approach nurtures independent learning and cultivates students' confidence in their ability to arrive at solutions through reasoned inquiry.
• Integrated into Daily Student Learning: Students access their PowerBuddy assistant directly in their assignment workflow in Schoology, eliminating the need for alternative standalone and potentially insecure or inappropriate AI tools. PowerBuddy understands the context of the student's lessons and assignments along with grade level and learning standards so that they can receive the most effective, personalized help they need.
• Security and Privacy: In addition to adhering to Responsible AI principles, PowerSchool protects the security and integrity of our applications – including robust cloud security, security by design, third-party penetration testing, and a responsible disclosure program – all validated by independent third-party auditors.

“My favorite part is that PowerBuddy is embedded within Schoology and that my students don’t have to go to another place to access PowerBuddy,” said Suzy Hurin, third grade teacher at Pequot Lakes Public Schools in Minnesota. “The safety feature, with PowerSchool’s filtering, is the difference between PowerBuddy and other AI products. Other AI products are not somewhere I would send my students. Even with all the firewalls, students will figure out how to get around it. My students don’t have free rein and I know their resources are in a safer, filtered environment.”

PowerBuddy for Data Analysis: Transforming Data Analysis in Education with Conversational AI

PowerBuddy for Data Analysis serves as a co-pilot, supercharging data analysis by enabling users to access data effortlessly through natural language conversation. This innovative AI assistant drastically reduces the time it takes to respond to data requests by eliminating query writing, automating data visualizations, and producing detailed data analysis. Such capabilities empower educators and administrators to make informed decisions with such speed and simplicity that was not possible until now.

According to a recent study, approximately two-thirds of public school students now attend a school with high or extreme chronic absenteeism. By using natural language prompts, PowerBuddy can swiftly deliver relevant insights, trends, and patterns that assist educators in developing strategic interventions and actionable plans not only for addressing these issues but also for proactively tackling other challenges and opportunities.

Key Benefits of PowerBuddy for Data Analysis:

• Democratized Data Access: Drastically simplifies and expedites data analysis through interactive conversation and offers insightful prompts to encourage comprehensive data exploration. This reduces the need for complex data manipulation and Structured Query Language (SQL) coding, making data and insights more accessible throughout the district.
• Accelerated Decision-Making: Rapidly explores ad hoc questions, provides relevant suggestions for data exploration, visualizations, and summarization, and identifies pertinent trends and anomalies for timely decisions.
• Time Savings: Streamlines operations and significantly reduces workload for technical teams by transforming the influx of ad-hoc data requests into intuitive visual narratives through natural language interaction.

“PowerBuddy for Data Analysis streamlines the process of building out data requests for our programmer analysts,” said Michael Marassa, Chief Technology Officer at New Trier Township High School District 203. “By learning over time, PowerBuddy significantly increases our efficiency in handling these requests.”

“PowerBuddy for Data Analysis allows districts to harness the full potential of their data,” said Stumpf. “With its intuitive natural language interface, users can now ‘talk to their data,’ transforming complex analyses that could take hours into immediate, actionable insights within minutes. This transformation allows for a genuine data-driven decision-making culture, removing barriers that previously limited non-specialists or non-experts from accessing and effectively utilizing data to maximize impact on student achievement, educator effectiveness, district operations, and parent engagement.”

For more information on PowerBuddy™ for Learning and PowerBuddy™ for Data Analysis, visit https://www.powerschool.com/powerschool-ai/powerbuddy/.

About PowerSchool

PowerSchool (NYSE: PWSC) is the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America. Its mission is to empower educators, administrators, and families to ensure personalized education for every student journey. PowerSchool offers end-to-end product clouds that connect the central office to the classroom to the home with award-winning products including Schoology Learning and Naviance CCLR, so school districts can securely manage student data, enrollment, attendance, grades, instruction, assessments, human resources, talent, professional development, special education, data analytics and insights, communications, and college and career readiness. PowerSchool supports over 55 million students in more than 90 countries and over 17,000 customers, including more than 90 of the top 100 districts by student enrollment in the United States. Learn more at www.powerschool.com.

© PowerSchool. PowerSchool and other PowerSchool marks are trademarks of PowerSchool Holdings, Inc. or its subsidiaries. *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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