After School Club Management

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

 

Aside from SIMS Activities and Schoolcomms Clubs, is anyone using a local or cloud based solution to manage clubs?

 

The ideal is something that integrates with SIMS, has registers, can report on attendance with various categories e.g. pupil premium, can cope with music lessons, and can advise parents when a student doesn’t attend.

 

Is there anything other than these two products?

 

Thanks

[hallb15]

Have you tried SIMS Activities? I've been asked to look into it but its not something I've any experience of.

Do you know how much it costs?

[ticker]

schoolcomms, Schoolcomms Products & Solutions for Schools had a mail shot saying its a new product. Edited May 20, 2016 by ticker

[Gongalong]

SIMS Activities is pretty basic, but it's a new product.

 

We've looked at Schoolcomms Clubs and Tucasi Extended Day which are inevitably very oriented around their core products, so good if you need to connect it with charging.

 

CHQ Virtual Activities Environment is the most fully featured of the products we've found, but also the most expensive.

 

We're going to decide which features are important, and go from there.

[SouthCoastSaint]

We had a demo of Sims Activities that sadly couldn't have gone much worse. The website wasn't working so we had to be talked through features. All the things we asked for that it couldn't do (and there were many, some really basic functions), were apparently going to be written in over time. The trouble was, it wasn't cheap and we were told repeatedly that the incredibly cheap price we would be paying initially was due to lack of features - implication being that the price would rise considerably on renewal.

[hallb15]

I've been given a guide price for SIMS Activities of 75p per pupil per year. I've only just started looking into this though so I don't have anything to compare that to yet...

[eean]

We use chq. It is full of features and handles everything from activity sign up to allocation to registration. We use it for many more things than we originally purchased it for. The interface is a bit clunky and it's quite a learning curve (but if you're used to Sims then you'll be used to that.) We use it extensively for communication, and it is easy to send personalised messages to very specific groups of people. E.g 'boys who take an activity on a Thursday but aren't on the ski trip'.

It has full integration with SIMS and knows, for example, students lesson timetables.

 

We also use it for people to register for one off events e.g squad trials, or provide permission to go on school trips. You can send out a special email and students or parents can sign up in one click. Then, just as easily, chase up people who haven't responded. Soon we will use it to organise registers for school buses.

 

Schoolsbuddy is a new kid on the block. I haven't used it but it looks pretty.