Sims.net OPTIONS - Does Anybody Use It? Is It Any Good ? What are Your opinions

[bwfc_nottingham]

Hi All

 

Is anybody using Focus ----> Options in SIMS?

 

The reason I ask is because one of our SLT appears to have chatted to another member of SLT in a school far away and the school far away said "Oh we use Options ...it's Fab"

 

Well I have had a peek at the user manuals and it looks very complicated and very clunky.

 

FYI : When we do new academic year timetables, I have when possible encouraged the use of SYLK files for putting students in classes and rather surprisingly the teachers quite like it and it works really well. I am a tad worried that somebody from SLT has this "whim" that school A does it therefore we should do it and hey presto I end up doing it.

 

Any thoughts or your experiences of the said product would be most helpful.

 

Regards

 

Phil

[Linfit]

How useful you find it depends on your existing options process.

 

We have essentially "free choice" here, so pupils pick four subjects and then we try and make up the option blocks to accommodate as many first choices as possible. Because of this, we find Options very useful as it allows you to manage this process well: its something that is tedious to do manually or in a spreadsheet.

 

The interface looks complicated but is in fact fairly easy to use once you get into it, but it is a little fiddly to set up as it requires the new academic year to exist, you have to import students, set up subjects etc. I do this and it usually takes me a morning, and a Deputy Head then actually uses the software to work out the blocks. He is only an average SIMS user but has found it straightforward enough to use. He likes it because we operate a system of 1st 2nd 3rd and 4th choices and reserves and the software is designed around that type of approach.

 

If you are a school which has fixed option blocks where the subject distribution is already decided and the pupil choices are constrained then its really not necessary: the set up and admin overhead wouldn't be justified.

[bwfc_nottingham]

Linfit, Thanks for that

 

We may only want it for Y9 , where the students do 'taster options' and Y10, for the GCSE options as these are the only two years that have 'options' .

 

Does that make the process easier or more difficult

 

oh and we have fixed option blocks, whereby students choose one subject from one of 'n' blocks (although I am not a timetable'r so don't necessarily know the ins and outs of timetable block setup).

 

Regards

 

Phil

 

 

Regards

Phil