[sims] Bulk creating Aspects in SIMS - Lots and Lots of Aspects to create.

[jonwilf]

Good Morning,

The Science dept has given me their template (in excel) for their new Essential Mix Mark sheets for the whole subject.

There is roughly around 365 brand new shiny aspects to be created and as per usual a very short time to create them all.

 

I did find a thread that had a macro worksheet to convert the headings for a bulk upload into sims. unfortunately this didn't work for me and as the thread was dated a long time a go a guessed it could be out of date tech.

 

Is there a quick way for me to create these aspects using the spread sheets provided?

 

Any help is much appreciated, it will save my life!

 

Thanks in advance.

[bobsmith]

365 aspects??

 

All I can say is best of luck, is this being rolled out to other subjects?

[jonwilf]

Thanks,

all the other subjects where straight forward and didn't request as much at all.

Come to think of it all of the other subjects together didn't even request a third of the aspect

[PhilNeal]

The steer from Ofsted/Government is to create fewer assessment opportunities. Is this something to refer to your curriculum deputy?

[vikpaw]

I'm guessing they are recreating a daily markbook, rather than recording assessments.

Even so, I'd want to query it with someone higher up as Phil said.

[Banjo]

Is this beacuse they are not using result sets to timestamp the results over the school year?

[tben2505]

Good Morning,

The Science dept has given me their template (in excel) for their new Essential Mix Mark sheets for the whole subject.

There is roughly around 365 brand new shiny aspects to be created and as per usual a very short time to create them all.

 

I did find a thread that had a macro worksheet to convert the headings for a bulk upload into sims. unfortunately this didn't work for me and as the thread was dated a long time a go a guessed it could be out of date tech.

 

Is there a quick way for me to create these aspects using the spread sheets provided?

 

Any help is much appreciated, it will save my life!

 

Thanks in advance.

 

I take it since people were more interested in WHY the OP was doing this - no one knows HOW?

 

I'm looking to create 100+ aspects I have designed in Excel and would like to do the same.

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

The quickest way to create a lot of aspects is to generate an Assessment Manager XML import file containing all the definitions. I've done something similar for our systems here but you need to know what you are doing as it's easy to overwrite something in your system without realising. In short you run a report from SIMS listing all the external IDs for your internal aspects, order it so you get the highest number/code. Create 1 aspect as a template to base the rest off and export it, then I used an xslt transformation pre-programmed with the next aspect external ID, to take a list of the aspect names I wanted and the aspect template file to generate another file with all the aspects I could just import in to SIMS. It's not all that complicated to do if you 1. understand the structure of SIMS Assessment import files. 2. know how to manipulate xml with xslt. 3. have a test system you can try it on while learning.

[tben2505]

The quickest way to create a lot of aspects is to generate an Assessment Manager XML import file containing all the definitions. I've done something similar for our systems here but you need to know what you are doing as it's easy to overwrite something in your system without realising. In short you run a report from SIMS listing all the external IDs for your internal aspects, order it so you get the highest number/code. Create 1 aspect as a template to base the rest off and export it, then I used an xslt transformation pre-programmed with the next aspect external ID, to take a list of the aspect names I wanted and the aspect template file to generate another file with all the aspects I could just import in to SIMS. It's not all that complicated to do if you 1. understand the structure of SIMS Assessment import files. 2. know how to manipulate xml with xslt. 3. have a test system you can try it on while learning.

 

I got quite far with it - doing something similar to you - the ext. ID I created using the date and time, then intend to increment +1 - I'm assuming no other IDs will come anything near that. Trickier to include gradesets, though, and I got stuck trying to save the file back as XML!

 

I think proper provision to do this in SIMS would be useful.