[SIMS] Possible to record who has been sent a sims.net report generated letter?

[DChurchill]

Hello,

 

Apologies if this has been asked before.

 

We would like to send out a letter to students who have reached certain milestones of achievement points. They may reach these milestones at any time during the year so the report would be run as much as daily. The first filter is easy: student has more than X achievement points. The second filter though has me stumped... Only run for students that have not had this letter before.

 

My thoughts so far are either dumping into an excel sheet which does some jiggery pokery and then mail merging from there or recording who has had a letter via an assessment column and filtering the report on this.

 

Both of these options require a bit more work than desired and if SIMS could write back to itself that it has created the report for a given student that would be great.

 

I also thought that auto uploading to student file would be good - is this possible via reports, or any another method?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

David.

[DChurchill]

Hello,

 

Just to bump this up and to give an update.....

 

After lots of trying and a little bit of swearing at SIMs it I now believe that this is likely to be impossible.

 

The main issues I have encountered are:

 

- The fact that "Total Achievement Points" isn't attached to a date - only the individual achievements themselves are.

- To get around this I thought I could use Effective Date but I would need two effective dates (more that X points now & Less than X points when I last ran it) I have had no luck with this as I think I can only have one effective date in a report (which makes sense).

 

Am I approaching this from the wrong angle.... If you are a school that reports on achievement milestones (e.g. Bronze, Silver and Gold Certificates when a student reaches a certain number of points) how do you ensure that a student doesn't receive multiples? For example the next day they would still have more than X points and therefore still qualify but would have already received one.

 

Is it a case of running once every half term and getting a certificate for that date range and all are handed out then, for example?

 

Any advice on how this is done in your school or if there is a possible way to achieve my original proposal (that hopefully doesn't involve manipulation with data from SIMS via Excel or Access) I would be very grateful.

 

Thank you,

 

David.

[bobsmith]

I largely gave up with this, but one hurdle I overcame was that you issue a behaviour of "achieved bronze" etc. This is your record that the milestone has been reached, then you can use that to stop duplicates.

[DChurchill]

Thanks Bob,

 

The only way I can find to do that is to go into each student and then into one of their achievements and manually choose a certificate in that achievement. To do this manually for each student that has one produced seems like a lot of work.... Any way to do this in bulk?

 

To give some context we are moving from a relatively whizzy (but very expensive) online behaviour solution to SIMS and I am attempting to recreate what we could do (which for 99% of what we could do I can).

 

Cheers,

 

David.

[bobsmith]

Focus >> Behaviour Management >> add new?

[jonrose]

Hi David

This is possible, though it took me some time to figure out how to do it using macros etc in a report. My report outputs a spreadsheet from SIMS with a list of each kid and the Bronze/Silver/... certificate each has earned to date in one tab, then in another tab has a smaller list of only the kids who are due to be given new certificates since the last time the report was run.

 

If you drop me your email in PM I will send you a copy of the report I created for you to play about with.

 

Cheers

 

jon

[mb2k01]

Hi David

This is possible, though it took me some time to figure out how to do it using macros etc in a report. My report outputs a spreadsheet from SIMS with a list of each kid and the Bronze/Silver/... certificate each has earned to date in one tab, then in another tab has a smaller list of only the kids who are due to be given new certificates since the last time the report was run.

 

If you drop me your email in PM I will send you a copy of the report I created for you to play about with.

 

Cheers

 

jon

 

 

Hi Jon,

If you were willing to send me a copy too that would be fantastic. I'm looking at trying to do the same thing as the OP.

[jonrose]

Hi Jon,

If you were willing to send me a copy too that would be fantastic. I'm looking at trying to do the same thing as the OP.

 

Sure that's no problem, just send me your email and I'll get it sent to you later, I'm just tidying up the macro code I'm bit of a VBA novice

[DChurchill]

Thanks Jon, PM sent.

[PhilNeal]

I'm pretty sure that SchoolComms can do most of what you require as does InTouch.

[DChurchill]

The main motivation for the change was to save money so the above doesn't make sense for us unfortunately.

 

It's a shame that so much money must be spent when all I really need is a report that says Student X has Y points today and had less than Y points the last time I ran the report.

 

After a few discussions I think we're going to change the way we report achievement points to the kids (probably half termly certificates or similar).