[sims] Parental Reports - SIMS or TASC/Pars?

[examsqueen]

Question for SIMS users - Who is responsible for creating the reports (I mean setting up, not entering teacher grades & comments, obvs) that go to parents?

We currently do course-grades reports (grades only, no comments) in SIMS, but for 'full' reports we have a complicated word-doc-and-mail-merge process. I'm keen to move all reporting onto SIMS, BUT we've just decided to get PARS (by TASC). It can handle reports as well.

My questions are -does anyone have experience of both?

Which would be better for reports?

Can we enter comments via assessment and have them pulled into PARS reports?

How about the other way around?

and finally - how do YOU do reporting in your school? Through assessment? Profiles? Some other software / process?

[bobsmith]

Can't answer most of your points because I've only ever looked at the TASC website, it's something I REALLY want to try cos it looks 10x (maybe 100x) better than SLG.

 

Who is responsible for creating reports - me, the data manager. Who else? (I do cheat and have an assistant who has the fun job of putting all the aspects in, but I've still got to check it all works).

How do we do reporting in our school - SIMS all the way. Assessment Marksheets + individual reports for the standard report (3 or more times per year) then Comments are done through profiles for the wordy report once a year.

[vikpaw]

I think it's a combo. Use SIMS to design, structure create etc. use TASC to input grades, comments etc. then send them out through PARS.

TASC will let your staff access SIMS remotely and with a nicer interface

[Steven_Cleaver]

We use both in fact we use PAR's and Insight from Tasc and SIM's. It is sort of as vikpaw says.

 

How we use the systems.

 

SIM's - Database that stores everything,Marksheets for some Analysis etc

 

PAR's (Tasc) - Staff do Attendance, Behaviour, Detentions, and Grades into PAR's this all links to SIM's. We also use PAR's for texting to Parents and has quite a vast set of as well as bespoke Reports etc.

 

Insight (Tasc) - Parental and Student Portal can view Attendance, Behaviour, Detentions, Home works (just starting to use) Reports (Grades Reports), Options, other documents etc.

 

Our Exams Officer is responsible for Reporting, we sort of use the same as you complicated Mail Merge to create end of year Reports once a year, other three Reports are Grades only, the End of year Reports are the only Paper Based Reports that go to Parents all other Reports 3 times a year go onto Insight, when we did the calculations by reducing the reports home to Parents saved us more than the cost of Insight alone.

 

Feel free to ask any other questions.

[examsqueen]

Hey - thanks for the fab replies. I've gone with comment aspects in marksheets for now to get comments onto individual reports. It's going swimmingly.

 

We've got PARS, in the testing phase. Attendance & behaviour are set up & working but I can't get my head around grading and their wiki isn't terribly useful. Before I harass the helpdesk guys I thought I'd ask here - anyone doing grading in PARS? Did you have to go through a laborious process of importing all the aspects and associating them with results sets, year groups and subjects? Is there a shortcut?

 

Also - do these SIMS aspects allow teachers to have a markbook setup, so they can keep track of their own stuff (class tests etc) separate from the main stuff we want in Assessments?