[sims] Looking for Sims Learning Gateway Rollout To Parents Advice

[JF10]

Hello

My manager is looking for some advice on how to best roll-out SLG to parents. Should he initially do a year group? Just interested parents? Things of this nature and any other advice that you think would be useful to an independent school with SLG.

Could you PM me and we arrange a phone call at some point for him to discuss?

Thank you very much.

[PhilNeal]

I'd start with the oldest children. You could pilot with staff members' children.

[vikpaw]

Capita used to supply a very useful document on this. If you've got a My Account login, try and seek it out, but it's tough to find some things.

It discussed rollout and things to bear in mind before you make your data public, such as behaviour records, and how they are written.

Staff parents is a great test.

Controlling by year group is good, and you could even setup sessions to help them during parents evenings.

[fiza]

In my previous school we had to go through all the behaviour records and remove other students names from the comments before we rolled out SLG. It took a while and we also set it to publish only resolved issues. Staff still made the mistake of naming other students sometimes but it happened a lot less when they knew parents would see the comments.

[PhilNeal]

There is a flag to prevent teacher comments from coming through to parents which safeguards the problem described by @fiza. This way parents see the standard behaviour description and date only.

[clockend25]

We invited parents to volunteer to be part of a pilot, along with staff members with children. We then rolled out to all parents.

 

I think the initial config can be done quite quickly (we've restricted quite a bit initially, with a view to rolling out more as we go on), it's really about you deciding what you want people to be able to access and see. For us, the bigger things were defining processes to deal with the subsequent user request. We were adding several hundred people to our support base and needed to make sure the enquiries and queries could be responded to quickly and properly.

 

As mentioned, Capita provide quite a bit of advice through documentation on all of this.

[vikpaw]

We're currently planning a system to allow users self service account unlock, password reset and change so that our 1800 ish parents don't add too much burden on the IT Support team.

[CAM]

Been down this route before! I rolled out SLG in my school and gave the LA a bit of help too with their hosted service on a working group about 3-4 years ago.

 

Make sure you do it in stages, start with a simple to publish year group such as Year 7 and run it alongside your existing system. Once that group of parents have taken to SLG, start to slowly expand it. Don't do the entire school at once no matter what SLT say! Otherwise you will be swamped with login problems and questions from parents and adoption will fall off a cliff. Experienced this myself.

 

You will also want to test using parent-teachers as Phil suggests as they can give you feedback on UI and workflow, plus they won't be so annoyed if comments slip through the system that weren't intended for external viewing. Your database will also need a good spring clean by fixing duplicate parents so they don't end up with two separate logins for siblings, updating contact details to ensure they are accurate and acquiring confirmation the parents have read the TOS with their password securely delivered and understand they need to keep their login details safe. The latter can be done at parents evening.

 

Lastly, start learning how to customise SharePoint as it is difficult to get to grips with. You will want to practice now and start working out how you want to brand SLG. It needs custom branding as the default SLG skin quite frankly looks bland and out of place for a school. Too corporate! SIMS hosted offers a service to change the skin or other schools might be able to offer the service, maybe even your LA if they are running a county-wide hosted solution.