[sims] Individual Student Reports - How do you do it?

[Kyle]

I've been asked to look into options for creating Individual Student Reports. Currently we just pull the Effort and CAP grades out for each student building up over the year but to be honest its pretty poor as a lot of parents dont understand it even when thee is a KEY provided. Staff complain as they don't get the chance to add any personnel comments and in general we would liek to make it more parent friendly. Previously we have used Profiles (before my time) but staff were not happy with this so it was ditched.

[zag]

Staff write the reports in Sims assessment manager, the reports are then outputted to TASC insight.

 

Staff have access to sims from home with RDP which helped a lot with adoption.

Edited June 10, 2013 by zag

[number34]

We use SIMS assessment manager with grade and comment aspects. Individual reports are then created and distributed by paper as well as uploading to the document server so that they are available online via TASC Insight.

[vikpaw]

We use SIMS assessment manager with grade and comment aspects. Individual reports are then created and distributed by paper as well as uploading to the document server so that they are available online via TASC Insight.

We do the same apart from the upload to TASC

[ee31ag]

We use Individual Reports where each subject enters effort/behaviour/level etc. on a marksheet and then the form tutor provides a summarising comment in a "comment" aspect. This seems to work fine as the form tutor's comment is less than the 1000 character limit of a comment aspect. There are a few catches: to avoid mishaps until they are used to the system, I encourage form tutors to write their comments in Word and then cut and paste into the marksheet. However, if they haven't "expanded" the comment cell then only the first paragraph is correctly pasted across. Also, you can't right-click to paste so I need to teach them the ctrl+v shortcut!

 

This year we have started getting A level teachers to write UCAS references via SIMS: however, it was clear that the 1000 word limit was going to be a problem so I have opted to use "Profiles" instead. These seem to be considerably more trouble to set up initially although teachers don't seem to be having trouble entering their references. I'll see how it all pans out but I think I'd much prefer to use templates and comment aspects with Individual Reports wherever possible rather than Profiles.

[ICTLady]

We use Assessment Manager marksheets for each class. Teachers enter scores for behaviour, homework etc as well as current and target grades.

 

I have some marksheets for the whole year group where I pull together all of their scores for behaviour, homework etc and either the average or a count (either of "good" scores or "bad" ones). These are exported into Excel where I use v_lookup to autofill comments based on these averages and counts. So, if a student has no "bad" scores, they'll automatically get a congratulatory comment etc.

 

Heads of Faculty and Heads of House have marksheets to check over (and change, if needed) all of the scores and auto generated comments for their cohorts before they go to print. Autogenerated comments save a lot of time but there will always be a handful of student who need more personal feedback for whatever reason.

 

We then use Individual Report to pull all of this together into a report in Word. We print a paper copy to go home and upload to the document server.

[Kyle]

Can you set the comment bank to take less than the 1000 limit? If so how?

[vikpaw]

No, but if you fix the size of the output table row in the individual report, it will just not show through more than the fixed space you provide. Doesn't really stop people from writing too much though. Our problem is they need more than that and i have to give up to 3 comment aspects for them to spread the info over.

[bclarke]

We use Aim High by 4C Software. It is really flexible and can do pretty much anything you want. Their staff are knowledgable and can advise on the best way to do it, help set the reports up and will create the layouts for you. The software is a very reasonable price and they also have an online planner where you can push the reports to for online parent access and student homework.

 

This has revolutionised our reporting process. We don't print any reports any more and all checking is done online.

[CAM]

I use Assessment Manager to collect reports as well because Profiles is far too complicated. Unfortunately the marksheet route is also very basic for entering text comments and I've had one case where staff were very disapproving of going from a homebrew reporting system to a basic comments box. It's a shame that proper reporting features don't exist for free text comments but I don't think Capita expected us to shun Profiles in favour of marksheets.

[CarpeDiem]

We use marksheets and then Individual Reports as well - school c. 1800 pupils and lots of staff and no issues so far! I don't like Profiles as it seems impossible to alter class associations once the season is open, so we are looking into alternative options. Any individual reports sent home are uploaded to document server as well, in case of query to HoY from parents etc. We use an alternative third-party software provider for our narrative reports but the Individual Reports work well for updates and interim reports.