All BUSD schools are now using Illuminate to track attendance and student assessment data, and record grades. Berkeley Unified School District switched from PowerSchool to a new student information system at the start of the 2017-18 school year. The new portal is Illuminate Student Information (ISI) and access for parents and guardians is made available through Illuminate Home Connect.
Beginning with 2018-19, all BUSD parents and guardians will have access to Illuminate. This online tool allows teachers and staff to share information about your student’s attendance, grades, and academic progress. It is essential that we have accurate parent/guardian contact information so that you can access important information about your student and we can reach you in case of an emergency. (This online tool will be used to collect contact and emergency information for each student and will eventually replace the need for a paper emergency card.)
For more details specifically about K-5 report cards, please see Family Guide to Report Cards.
Middle and high school students can log in using their @students.berkeley.net email login; no other password information is needed. Information for parents/guardians to be able to log-in is mailed to each family residence on file.
The change from PowerSchool to Illuminate was made for a number of reasons.
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- There is now a single log-on to access information and assessment data about students — For staff, this means no need to look in PowerSchool for some things, and Illuminate for others.
- The Illuminate gradebook is robust, and (unlike PowerSchool) runs on Chromebooks just the same as it does on a Mac or Windows computer.
- Illuminate is certified by the state for teachers to verify attendance electronically. After Berkeley transitions to ISI and the state certifies BUSD, teachers will no longer have to sign attendance sheets each week as they do now.
- Assessments done in Illuminate DnA (the data platform teachers have been already using for assessments) appear in the ISI Gradebook without additional teacher work, unlike the cumbersome import required for PowerSchool.
- ISI has novel tools to allow staff, such as our resource teachers or intervention counselors, to monitor certain groups of students in a way that was not possible to do in PowerSchool.
If you need access to a computer, contact a public library or your student’s school. If you are having technical difficulties accessing your Illuminate account, please send a list of all students in your family and their schools in an email request for help to: illuminatehc@berkeley.net