Sims Learning Gateway advice

[fawkers]

Hello Everyone

My school has now started to consider what it wants to do with regard to online reporting to parents and since we are a SIMS school we are considering SLG. I was wondering how easy SLG was to set-up and introduce to both teachers and parents, What are the major pitfalls to avoid?

 

Thanks

.Adam

[Sivadam]

We use the Capita Hosted Service.

I cannot praise it enough!

And that is echoed by our Staff and Parents who are using it! Even the technophobes are happy!

We had a school closure on Tuesday because of snow. Many Staff were delighted as they could catch up on completing their Assessments from home!

 

Pitfalls?

1. Before you start you need to ensure that your data is clean, in terms of Contacts etc.

2. When staff are using it they must ensure that they click 'Save' often. Because it is web-based, any data entered will be lost if there is a loss of connection or they navigate away from the Data screen they are using.

3. Err..........

 

It is improving all the time and big things are on the horizon! See the SLG Roadmap on SupportNet.

Edited January 8, 2010 by Sivadam

[BandyQuill]

we use an SLG here and *touch wood* we rarely have any problems with it, to the point where SMT run it for us, because there are so few problems

[EduTech]

Morning Adam,

 

Would you prefer for you to manage it yourself? or looked after by your LA or Local SIMS Team?

 

We have ours hosted buy SMIS, up for renewal soon actually... it was something that our LA provided us with at a lowercost but seems it might be better to have it in-house when the renewal comes round.

 

A hosted solution is useful, i do like the face at the moment that parents login to our intranet and then have re-authenticate agaist a completly different network to get into SIMS Data.. just that extra bit of security always keeps the boss's happy.

 

So yeah, you probably need to ask your self weather you want it internal or hosted extrernally?

 

As for implementing it for staff to use, it's pretty straight forward staff seem to nag alot of the time as the would prefer to have Full SIMS..

 

Parents, we are just looking @ this now.

 

James.

[teejay]

If it is just for parental access, also investigate the other options such as Insight from Tasc, which does the parental access side of it and link to SIMS.

It doesn't do the teacher access for Profiles etc, but tbh our staff have remote access anyway and don't need or want a different way of accessing SIMS externaly.

[Edu-IT]

Is it still really ugly? The demo version on the Capita site is horrid.

[Sivadam]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

 

It would be s trange world if we all fancied exactly the same things!

[Sivadam]

 

As for implementing it for staff to use, it's pretty straight forward staff seem to nag alot of the time as the would prefer to have Full SIMS..

 

James.

 

 

Our staff do have full SIMS access in School with the Option of SLG at Home

...... or on the beach in Spain

...... or on the bus on the way to school!

[Edu-IT]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

 

It would be s trange world if we all fancied exactly the same things!

That's a yes then.

 

Have you seen some of the photos on the demo site? I think they must be the designers.

[Sivadam]

Ah ........

 

But Ben Abbott does not attend Handsworth Grange!

 

Maybe you should look at a real site and not at a demo!

Edited January 8, 2010 by Sivadam

[notalot]

We have been running an inhouse version of SLG and the newer SLG2 and we have no end of problems. The level of support from Capita has been schocking (even by capita standards).

 

I would strongly recomend against an inhouse hosted SLG (unless you have someone who is very experanced with Shairpoint). We are intending on moving to an LA hosted SLG once they have it up and running.

[EduTech]

This is what our SIMS Webparts looks like

 

James.

[EduTech]

Our staff do have full SIMS access in School with the Option of SLG at Home

...... or on the beach in Spain

...... or on the bus on the way to school!

 

So do ours, but they want Full SIMS Access @ Home

 

Only way that is going to happen is if we get SGD as that is the root we are looking to go down.

 

James.

[Edu-IT]

SGD?

 

James, was that difficult to achieve? Nice design.

[EduTech]

SGD?

 

James, was that difficult to achieve? Nice design.

 

Sun Global Desktop Like Terminal Services/Citrix etc but we like the SUN Route

 

As for the design nope, thats our learning platform masterpage anyhow.. i just tweaked it slightly for SIMS as they use WSS and we use MOSS and some parts were not available but it works well.

 

It's really a matter of getting to grips with the master pages in sharepoint, The Code that is used by Core.CSS so that you overwright it using your own CSS.

 

James.

[Edu-IT]

Sun Global Desktop Like Terminal Services/Citrix etc but we like the SUN Route

 

As for the design nope, thats our learning platform masterpage anyhow.. i just tweaked it slightly for SIMS as they use WSS and we use MOSS and some parts were not available but it works well.

 

It's really a matter of getting to grips with the master pages in sharepoint, The Code that is used by Core.CSS so that you overwright it using your own CSS.

 

James.

Cool, cheers. I'm wondering if our LA will 'brand' it anyway and we'll be stuck with whatever they decide looks good. Hopefully it's not like the LA portals.