[sims] Can you use Options Module for Enrichment

[duesouth]

One afternoon per week, we have a double period of wellbeing/enrichment. This consists of 50 options to choose from, ranging from American Football to Crochet.

 

Pupils pick three options - one for each term, plus a backup.

 

For the autumn term and this term, our Assistant Head has used an Excel spreadsheet populated from a Google form that pupils completed. Choices were then manually entered into SIMS so registers could be taken.

 

This has proven to be unworkable. My question is, can we use the SIMS Options module for something like this? It's whole school, rather than our Year 10 GCSE options which are just for the one year group. When I look at an existing plan, there's a target year taught in field on the Plan Details screen - and it doesn't seem like you can multi select year groups - would this be a show stopper for a whole school thing like this?

 

I'm not sure how many other schools are doing something like this - but anyone who is, I'd love to hear how you are administering it - from getting the choices from pupils, to allocating to classes, to getting those into SIMS for registers. I'm hoping there's a better way that can save us a lot of time!

 

Many thanks in advance.

[Linfit]

I'm not sure about Options, we don't use it, so collecting the choices I can't comment on.

But a key thing would be how you get it on the timetable to allow registers to be done.

If the groups are different for each year group, that's not so bad, you could simply schedule a large block of classes, one for each year group, then allocate students via curriculum management once they had made their choices.

Its an admin job but could be done in an afternoon and three times a year is not so bad.

 

The difficulty is if you have options which can be picked by more than one year group where they are in the same "class". This would require your timetabler to set up the block in one year group and then use Derived Bands to allow them to appear in the other years curriculum model. Do-able but significantly complicates the timetable - I would speak to your timetabler about the possible ways of doing it.

[msi_school]

We have a super complex enrichment calendar where any student can go to any event without booking. we have tried a number of different systems to register these sessions and are currently using Signin App with the sessions set up as member of staff so the student signs in with their QR code and just selects "who" they are visiting. we can then export the visitors logs and record attendance with these. The main drawbacks I can see are we are not using the software as intended so this work round could stop working and the information is not able to be written back to SIMS although in general Sign in App can do write back.

[duesouth]

Thanks for the reply. We've got the latter - our timetabler has used Derived Bands and we've got the timetable and registers sorted. The only issue is he's used one "Enrichment" subject, so pupils can't see exactly what they're doing (our timetabler didn't want to create 50 subject codes, can't say I blame him!). I've manually entered pupil choices via curriculum assignment - in a perfect world that would be an import, but it's not essential.

 

Our Asst Head is finding an Excel spreadsheet to be painful in terms of allocating pupils to classes, checking class numbers etc. The SIMS option module solution editor would be perfect - as we use it for GCSE options and it's great. I'm not sure if the options module will cope with whole school and some enrichment options being available for certain year groups only though. It almost feels like the only way it could do it is with a separate plan for each year group, which might help slightly - but we'd still be struggling to figure out overall class numbers that way...

 

I suspect we might need to buy in an external bit of software, but no idea what would fit the bill!

[duesouth]

We have a super complex enrichment calendar where any student can go to any event without booking. we have tried a number of different systems to register these sessions and are currently using Signin App with the sessions set up as member of staff so the student signs in with their QR code and just selects "who" they are visiting. we can then export the visitors logs and record attendance with these. The main drawbacks I can see are we are not using the software as intended so this work round could stop working and the information is not able to be written back to SIMS although in general Sign in App can do write back.

Thanks for the reply - we'll take a look at it. Slightly different problems to ours I guess in that we've got pupils booked in for each term's options and our issues are more around that than registers, which are working OK as long as I keep up with all the kid's change of minds!!