[sims] EOY Reports/Marksheets/Comment Banks

[ilsley_SIMS]

Hi,

 

I have been asked to start building EOY reports for our Y7-Y10s. What is the best way to go about doing this?

 

I was thinking of building a suite of marksheets that captures EOY data for each subject/year group, and then build the reports on the back of those. Our SLT are also keen to use comment banks for each year and subject, but I argued that it would be time-consuming to come up with so many statements. What approach do others take here?

 

If I do decide to go down the comment-bank route - how easy is it to set these up? I've never used them before.

 

Sorry for the salvo of questions, but any advice/tips would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thank you in advance!

[Banjo]

If you go down the comment bank route then you are using Profiles. That can be a steep learning curve, and your reports will need time for creation and plenty of testing. You will most likely run into permission & TT issues and an SLT that changes their mind as to the process of how the reports are checked online :-. When Profiles has been setup correctly it's pretty good, powerful and easy for the teacher(s). Comments (in your bank) can be auto triggered based upon a grade value in an aspect, "Has worked hard..." or "Needs to work harder..." etc, but their are plently of pitfalls you can fall into in your first year.

 

You can use Assessment Manager to collect comments and merge these with other aspects to create a report. This will be very basic and not so easy for the teachers entering the comments into the aspect cells.

 

I think it might be a bit late in the year for Profiles to be setup, but something worth considering for next year.

[vikpaw]

I'd go with the simpler to implement solution for now which precludes comment banks in the easiest form.

Assessment Marksheets, which can then be merged into a report format using Individual Reports.

It's easy enough for staff to enter data.

[ilsley_SIMS]

If you go down the comment bank route then you are using Profiles. That can be a steep learning curve, and your reports will need time for creation and plenty of testing. You will most likely run into permission & TT issues and an SLT that changes their mind as to the process of how the reports are checked online :-. When Profiles has been setup correctly it's pretty good, powerful and easy for the teacher(s). Comments (in your bank) can be auto triggered based upon a grade value in an aspect, "Has worked hard..." or "Needs to work harder..." etc, but their are plently of pitfalls you can fall into in your first year.

 

You can use Assessment Manager to collect comments and merge these with other aspects to create a report. This will be very basic and not so easy for the teachers entering the comments into the aspect cells.

 

I think it might be a bit late in the year for Profiles to be setup, but something worth considering for next year.

 

 

Thank you. I'm meeting with SLT later, so will mention this to them. But lots of food for thought for next year!

[ilsley_SIMS]

I'd go with the simpler to implement solution for now which precludes comment banks in the easiest form.

Assessment Marksheets, which can then be merged into a report format using Individual Reports.

It's easy enough for staff to enter data.

 

I think that's the way forward too. Thank you!

[tben2505]

I'd go with the simpler to implement solution for now which precludes comment banks in the easiest form.

Assessment Marksheets, which can then be merged into a report format using Individual Reports.

It's easy enough for staff to enter data.

 

But Vikpaw - my issue with this is the checking of data - and if a Form Tutor/HOY needs to write a comment - how do they "see" the subject comments/grades in one place to make their judgement?

 

I would much prefer to use AM as Profiles looks too complicated. But for HOYS/Form Tutors to read the whole report to write their comment - that's going to be tricky, no?

 

Cheers!

 

T

[vikpaw]

@tben2505 - we had individual reports created which were laid out to maximise content and useful for proof reading, so they served two purposes as could be used by the teachers who wrote and any reviewer. I prefer to do it on screen, but most staff want to review printed out anyway, so we could print once and use many times.

 

I also had a lot of data reports built which could be filtered on a subject by a HoD for reviewing across multiple classes but only 1 subject. There are various ways to do it.

 

The only caveat with a data report out of the reporting engine is that in order for anyone to be able to run it, they either need high level rights to AM or, a specific permission within the system to View (All) . I went with the latter and all relevant staff were in the Report Result Read group.

 

In practise I've found that very few, of our staff at least, want to review data on-screen. They'd much rather take it home (or to the pool) on paper! So our clever online systems are always thwarted at the last stage. Even now on our new MIS, Engage, there is a built-in portal which allows reviewing, but people mostly want a print out, so we leave the fancy visuals behind, and dump data to Excel, then fiddle with it to maximise the use of the paper and print.

 

To this end, we've written Macros to automate the task. Soul destroying, but does what they want...

[tben2505]

Thanks @vikpaw, I think we'll go with the "paper" reviews (to the pool!) and see how it works - we just moved from Engage and the one thing I liked there is the review screen, where they can see everything in the one screen then write the HOY/FT comment.

 

Cheers again

[vikpaw]

That's the screen i'm thinking of, we have it configured for Form Tutor, Head of Year, IB, and Deputy Head comments, but, first they review on paper.

I can probably send you a sample of a report if you go down that route, though the easiest way in the first instance is to clone the ind. rep and strip out any formatting, tables and graphics.

Edit: leave the table to help lay out, but just remove extraneous layout and spacing, headers, footers etc.