[sims] SIMS Teacher App - (how) are you supporting it?

[divadiow]

Bearing in mind there's no kick-back for local support teams are you ...

 

swallowing the support this new additional will require?

charging on top of your SLA to support Teacher App?

not supporting it at all?

 

self-setup, easy config wishful thinking aside, it will require support from the LA team. How is everyone else dealing with this?

[JHLEHS]

We support this, overall this isn't too demanding. I have created a mail merge document which sends out an activation and association codes to our teachers in the junior department along with a step by step guide. Overall the feedback has been positive except for a few bugs which were fixed by running a SIMS performance patch on our server. We aim to roll this out to all teacher in our school come september, hopefully by then the teacher app admin portal UI will be improved and the process could be more automated.. For example it would be nice to input multiple users into the teacher app by .csv which could generate relevant codes? At present we have to add each device manually and associated the google account one at a time which is a bit of a pain. However once this has been setup the junior teachers are enjoying the app and it works well, without too much spent on support. (famous last words here).

[SimonCygnetIT]

For us it is covered in the schools annual support agreement. The schools have to purchase it directly from Capita and when the email comes through we do all the setup work and I go out to the school and show them how to set it up on devices. If they need any further help we will then look to go out and do some basic training with them on it. so far we have it running in 3 schools with another 2 possible. Setting it all up can be quite painless providing that all the right Communication ports are opened both at the School site and ISP area.The only problems I have had is schools taking a while to notify us that they have bought the product and then when we go to set it all up we find that the license key has expired and they need a new one.

[divadiow]

OK. that's fine. It's just *another* thing that is assumed we'll stretch to cover. However small the amount of support and time it needs, it's still an additional.

[JHLEHS]

I hear you, we have an ever growing list... Keeps us busy I suppose.

[splattthecat]

We are picking up support as part of the schools existing support package, although we are offering a chargeable service to set up the SIMS server for Teacher App access, training on the admin console use, and setting up a single tablet to test it's all working. We are charging this at our half day training rate. Schools can of course do the setup themselves if they wish.

[Damon]

We're supporting as part of the existing SLA too. You could easily charge a half day for setup and training though if it's a primary. Bear in mind you could potentially have reduced support calls due to issues with classroom installations of SIMS which you may or may not have remote access to. Furthermore it increases the reliance on SIMS and AM / Behaviour management so that's no bad thing if you're providing consultancy services.