Sims.net - Reporting on Achievement and Behaviour

[Iain.Faulkner]

Hi all,

 

We've recently startde using quite heavily the achievement and behaviour side of Sims.net and the staff are finding it relatively easy. The one area I could do with some assistance on is the reporting side.

 

Just to give you one example, our house/college leaders in school want to be able to run a report on their particular house/college at the end of a week/half term/term giving them a total of the number of behaviour points issued (obviously this can then be replicated to allow form tutors to do something similar).

 

Has anyone been able to get Sims to do this?

 

Any help anyone can provide would be gratefully received.

 

Cheers

 

Iain

[CAM]

Reporting is a pretty complex tool and personally, I'd check with your LA for training sessions. I attended one for free and it made a huge difference.

 

I had a peek in our own install here and found House under Student Focus but no Behaviour points option.

[Sylv3r]

As CAM has said, I would look to your LA or whowever provides support for your SIMS system to see if they are running any reporting courses.

 

There are a lot of pre-defined reports within SIMS and a lot can be tweaked or created from scratch - pretty much all of the data held can be reporting on in some form or another.

[jcollings]

If you register here

 

SupportNet

 

there is a load of documentation on basic report writing. The report writer is simple to use for basic reporting but can be a bit tricky for more complex reports.

 

Personally I sat down with the books and got going easily enough and have just picked stuff up as I've gone along. IMHO the Capita courses are expensive and too slow.

 

I've attached the basic reporting guide from Support Net for you to have a look at.

How_to_design_a_simple_report_11137.pdf

[Sivadam]

And have a look at some of the Reports that some of us have uploaded to the File Sharing part of SupportNet.

They may need editing to your taste and may even not work first time if you do not have the same fields set up, but Reporting in SIMS is highly configurable by an experienced user.

[Ecalpemos2000]

I have done this using an Analysis report. I will email the details if you require.

[garoc]

Iain

Ya should find reports you are looking for under:

 

Reports/Run Report/Focus/Student/Achievement* and Behaviour* ....and set filters to house/college etc... where necessary.

 

If not, then give your SIMS support team a call and ask them where/how etc...

Edited November 13, 2009 by garoc

[robins]

I have a report which prints a list of achievements to copy & paste into our weekly newsletter and others which print nice looking certificates via MS word RTFs (real time savers as we give out about a hundred certificates a week). Main bore with both is that date ranges have to be set on report filters every week - there is no dynamic concept of 'this week' or 'today' for date filters in SIMS (that I know of). Similarly it would be useful if staff could track a history of acheivements/behaviours records authored/attributed to them - similarly a filter can't be set based on who is logged into SIMS.

The views on screen for this info are available per child, per incident(inc type and activity type) etc but not per teacher. A 'my achievements' view would help.

[vikpaw]

@robins - Have you checked if all of these points are logged as change requests on SupportNet? If not you should log them.

[robins]

Apparently they are known limitations of the existing report builder. I look forward to the SQL reporting engine expected soon - presumably less usable but more powerful.

[vikpaw]

Apparently they are known limitations of the existing report builder. I look forward to the SQL reporting engine expected soon - presumably less usable but more powerful.

 

Madness!! Since the lesson monitor reports and panels in the widget have options for events 'this week' or 'last 2 weeks'. i guess adding that in for us to use is not worth their time/effort if they are concentrating on the new stuff.

 

ADDITION: you could prob' write your own report to filter by staff, but they would have to at the least enter their initials or name.

Edited November 18, 2009 by vikpaw
addition

[Nickfinn1974]

Dear all,

 

We do intend to work on the behaviour reports next year, at the moment we are collating requirments, to ensure that we meet as many of your needs as possible.

 

We will look at creating a consultation group early in the new year.

 

Kind regards

 

Nick

[Iain.Faulkner]

Thanks for all your replies to this,

 

I have signed up to supportnet but haven't been able to pull off the kind of reports we're looking for. Similarly I have spoken directly to capita and they have taken me through what they can.

 

I'm now pushing to attend the sims reporting courses however when I mentioned it at first the response was [rant] "why do IT need to go on the reporting course? Only the admin staff need to know how to do that"...well if that's the case why are you bothering me to create reports for you!!! [/rant]

[Sivadam]

I may well be at this as well, Iain.

Hope to see you there!

 

I'd be interested in knowing who you actually spoke to - please don't post the name here tho'! I have have found every member of Capita Staff to be coureous, polite, pleasant etc etc

Edited November 18, 2009 by Sivadam

[Iain.Faulkner]

hi Sivadam,

 

Apologies if my post read badly. The people at Capita were extremely helpful and polite, my rant was at the staff at our school who couldn't work out why I would need training on reporting.

[Sivadam]

That sounds more like the scenario that we all experience!

[Iain.Faulkner]

@ Sivadam - It was a proper facepalm moment when I was having the conversation. The really daft thing is that the woman who wants me to write the reports for her has apparently already been on the reporting training courses!

 

@ Ecalpemos - Thanks for all your help on this, it seems to be doing exactly what I want to now. Many thanks again.

[teejay]

What I would look at are the widgets that can be added to the home page. There are some good ones for achievement/behaviour (you can also print these). Also get the staff to start using Student Teacher View as this gives them a nice summary.

Printing out reams of paper reports is a waste of time, all the info is now very easily accessible straight from SIMS.

[smiths75]

Have you also tried configuring the SIMs home page to display Behaviour and Achievements? This info is updated every ten minutes on the home page as long as staff enter this into SIMs straight away e.g. in the lesson

It can be configured to show Behaviour incidents for any of the following cycle types:

Today, Previous Week, Previous Fortnight, Previous Month or Year to date.

and any of the following Group Types:

Whole School, Year Group or Reg Group

Using this method Heads of Year can keep a check on various groups and the info is up to date

We also use some custom reports that are run by HoY at the end of each day

[robins]

I can recommed the capita SIMS Advanced Reporting course having done it. I saw the brief for the intermediate course which looked worthwhile too.

I watched a demo yesterday and saw that its possible to input achievements/behaviour (even for multiple selected students via the register and link on left panel. Very useful for busy teachers.

[Sivadam]

Iain,

Have you checked out SupportNet as I indicated earlier?

The Analysis Reports I uploaded, for showing NetPoints across a date range for Reg Groups, can very easily be adapted to report for House Rather than a Reg Group.

They are on User Posts, File Sharing and are Posts 663 (Achievement) and 664 (Behaviour). You cannot do NetPoints as you cannot use both parameters at once across a date range. That is why Nick says that they are looking at enhancements in the future.

[Iain.Faulkner]

Thanks again everyone,

 

@ sivadam, I have been on supportnet and have downloaded the reports you've uploaded but they don't quite do what I need and I don't have the skills or the time (as I'm doing enough at home at the moment) to do many modifications. The ones provided by ecalpamos do what I need for now and I've found it really easy to tweak them to provide me with alternatives.

 

I have done the home page widget setup with all staff, and provided comprehensive training and "cheat sheets" on how to do it, but teachers being teachers want things on a plate for them (don't ask how the widgets aren't on a plate!) and they seem to prefer to have a report.

[pod]

I run reports each week for behaviour and achievement, if you are still stuck let me know. I upload the resulting csv file to a rewards system I created for the school, Lagan College - Northern Ireland's First Planned Integrated School.

It's fairly standard SIMS report writing, you just need to watch SIMS doesn't try to group results together, there's an option to deal with that when you are choosing the output type.