SIMS and CMIS Talking Attendance

Hello,
hoping for a bit of help.
We have a 6th Form that is shared between a couple of schools. We and another school use SIMS. A third school uses CMIS. Students are registered so that one of the schools is their "home" school but they may have lessons at all 3 sites. We are having a bit of a problem monitoring attendance!
At the minute, on our SIMS system, students have a full timetable as even the classes that they have at other sites exist within their timetable in our SIMS so that we can see where they are meant to be when etc. However, as the teachers at the other sites can't access our SIMS we rely on an admin at the other sites exporting attendance reports from their systems (either SIMS or CMIS) and sending it to us once a week. We then have to manually update attendance marks in SIMS for their lessons.

Is there a way of exporting marks from CMIS and importing into SIMS so that attendance marks are automatically updated?

Thanks in advance

You may be able to export from CMIS but i don't think there is an import into SIMS.
If you want to use some archaic technology you could investigate the OMR that SIMS does work with and send the marksheets to the other schools.
A better solution would be if you could give SIMS access to the other schools, via either SLG, TeachersWebFolder, TASC software (can't remember what it's called). Plus your own staff can benefit from it too.
Similarly, CMIS has it's own web portal, that you SIMS schools could use to mark attendance.

One other thing to make things easier, though could be considered bad practise is if you mark them all as present and then just ask the other school for a list of absences. We used to do this at a previous school, and try to get the data from the teacher emailed on the same day so you're not waiting a week for it. That way it's less to manager for the attendance manager.

The only concern is how you cope with firedrills, though presumably if you've got them on the timetable off site, you already have a way to deal with this.

Out of interest, do you have to mark them on your registers? Can't you mark them with one of those other codes that means educated off site, or approved other activity. Then you just need to fill in an absence sheet later, to calculate if they deserve EMA (if that's even still around.)..

Hi I came across your problem while browsing. The solution you need may already be partly in place at your school. Bristol has a licence for the Perspective product CLM which is used for tracking attandance and progress of learners attending lessons/courses offsite. By using SIF linked to the schools' MIS and with CLM as the co-ordinating hub, attendance marks can be shared/updated irrespective of which MIS the schools are using. As SIF is also in course of being implemented in Bristol your solution could well be at hand. If you need more detail or who to contact please let me know.