Sync SIMS with Google Classroom with SIMS ID

[colly72]

Hi all,

 

Is anyone here syncing from SIMS to Google Classroom with SIMS ID/SIMS ID Lite? I've seen lots of threads re Salamander etc but it looks like SIMS ID might do it for for free. Would be grateful for anybody's feedback on how well this works (or not).

 

Thanks

[David44]

I think you will struggle to find anyone with anything good to say about SIMS ID. Never used it for Google Classroom but I've suffered it in relation to SIMS Student and SIMS Parent. Even when it works it's so poorly designed and implemented that it will likely end up costing you more in time than paying for a better product in the first place. Another free option might be to write your own Google Classroom sync, we wrote ours in Powershell with help from PSGSuite (https://psgsuite.io/)

[colly72]

I think you will struggle to find anyone with anything good to say about SIMS ID. Never used it for Google Classroom but I've suffered it in relation to SIMS Student and SIMS Parent. Even when it works it's so poorly designed and implemented that it will likely end up costing you more in time than paying for a better product in the first place. Another free option might be to write your own Google Classroom sync, we wrote ours in Powershell with help from PSGSuite (https://psgsuite.io/)

 

Thanks for this. I don't suppose you'd be willing to share your powershell scripts, to give me a head start with it? TIA

[David44]

It's a little bit bespoke to our situation but the gist of it is to run a SIMS report that shows your classes and the members (main supervisor, other supervisors and students) including the third party reporting ID for each class and the primary email address for each member. Run through the report, checking to see if each class already exists as a Google Classroom Course by seeing if you have a Google Classroom Course that has an alias of the SIMS Class ID. If not, create it, give it an alias of the Class ID from SIMS and make the main supervisor the owner (optional, you may prefer to have a dummy user own all the courses instead). Now add the members to the course by primary email address (and optionally remove anyone who is a member of the course but not a member of the class). Repeat everyday. I plan to tidy up the script one day, it's been a learning experience and it as evolved over time to become a humongous working mess of code as SLT change their minds about what they want. It wouldn't give you a head start, it would give you a head ache. If I ever refactor it in to something more friendly to look at, I may see if I can make it available somewhere.

[hardtailstar]

We use the students UPN to sync SIMS and Google Classroom