[sims] SLG rollout to parents...?

[bandgeekmafia78]

Hi.

 

My school is at a point where we feel that we are in a position to rollout usernames/passwords to parents for SLG. However we aren't sure of the best strategy to do this...

 

Has anyone managed to do this, and if so what method did you use? An idea I had was to handout parent logons at parents evening so we can be sure that the parent has definately recieved the correct credentials.

 

Thanks.

Alan.

[Max_Power]

We are about to roll this out to parents as well. We intend to either give the details out at parents evening (similar to yourself) or send two emails to them using schoolcomms, one with the username and then another with the password.

 

Trying to avoid sending paper through the post.

[pete]

We did the parent evenings thing for the bulk of the parents. Ahead of the event parents were asked to bring along photo ID if they wanted access to SLG. We created a one-pager with how to get to SLG, what their username + password was, simple explanation of how to choose a password, what info was available on SLG plus screenshots. We used the docs as the default username/password template in SIMS.

 

The cost of mailing out the two separate letters to parents would have been silly (2 parent/guardians per kid x 2 = 4 letters). And relying on pupils to deliver it is just asking for a call from ICO.

[bandgeekmafia78]

It sounds like Parents Evening might be the way forward then. I did think of using KeepKidsSafe (a similar program to Schoolcomms) to email/text the parents although you can still never be sure that it would reach the right people.

 

On a similar note Pete: did you rollout the SLG to ALL parents at the same time, or did you phase this out i.e. year 7's first, year 8's second etc.?

Edited January 12, 2011 by bandgeekmafia78
adding extra text

[Max_Power]

It depends with the email / texting thing. We have a very good success rate when using our email / text service for absence, attendance, trips and snow days etc. The information is checked with parents each parents evening to ensure its current.

 

We are phasing our rollout, going for years 5 and 6 first to evaluate how many people manage to use it correctly and to ensure we arent bombarded with support issues from parents.

 

At the parents evening we are contemplating in having an open door system in an ICT suite where if a parent is waiting to speak with a teacher they can come and have a brew and login to SLG and have a quick look at it etc. Not all parents are confident ICT users so this may be beneficial to some people. If no one takes up the offer at least we have offered.

[Edu-IT]

We opened up SLG to a small group of parents from each year group. We did this to make sure SLG functioned correctly with a larger load and to allow the identification of any other issues before you had XYZ number of parents to support. By only opening it up to groups in phases you limit the amount of inconvenience you cause if you decide that you do need to take SLG down to remedy problems which arise.

[bandgeekmafia78]

Have any of you encountered problems with SLG parent provisioning? I'm concerned that our SIMS data might not be 'tidy' enough and that this will result in multiple logons for a parent if they have 2 or more children at the school.

[PhilNeal]

There is a reconcilation for parents option - i.e. if they have multiple log ons they can combine them. This works across schools too for LA hosted solutions.

[rh91uk]

We did it year group by gear group; seemed to work reasonably well.

[Iain.Faulkner]

Hi,

 

We're at pretty much the same position as you. I'm being told at this point we're going to roll it out to a selected group of parents who will use it for a trial period before we roll it out to everyone. My personal preference would be to roll it out year group by year group, after we have had the trial run. In terms of sending out usernames and passwords though....are you going to get parents to sign some sort of acceptable usage policy before you agree to send them their logon details (we're going to do this and also get them to give us up to date email addresses and mobile phone numbers)? If you are going to do this at a parents evening, then you may end up with a huge queue of people signing forms which may discourage some.

 

Sadly for us, we don't have the facility to text to parents (our headteacher doesn't like them) nor am I convinced that we have up to date email addresses for all parents, so for us I think we're going to have to send out multiple letters. One with the AUP, once returned we'll then send out another with username and then a third with password (what a pain!!). In addition though, I think I am going to aim to provide support for parents at the parents evenings and any other events where it may be relevant, at which point people can ask questions and I can run demo's as well.

 

Like you though I'm also concerned about the quality of our data. I haven't run any of the housekeeping processes as yet so I'm hopeful that this will reduce the amount of issues that there may be.

 

Just a random one for you, although I might speak to you about this on the train later. Have you done much work on "Personalising" the SLG? One of your deputy heads has raised as an issue that the SLG doesn't look like it's ours and woud like it to.

 

Hope this is of some use :-)

 

Iain

[Sivadam]

Have any of you encountered problems with SLG parent provisioning? I'm concerned that our SIMS data might not be 'tidy' enough and that this will result in multiple logons for a parent if they have 2 or more children at the school.

 

If you have Duplicate contacts then you may not be able to reconcile these, as they are 'different people'. e.g. Mrs S.Smith attached to one pupil and Ms Susan Smith attached to a sibling! There will be no family link in the SIMS Pupil record and the reconciliation may not work because of this issue.

At least that is what happened in the intial release of SLG in Septemebr 2008!

It is important that your contacts are not duplicated for many other reasons, so it is well worth doing a thorough check on these.

[bandgeekmafia78]

Iain - lucky for us our VLE is SharePoint and uses exactly the same template as the one for SLG. Therefore it looks pretty seamless

[Iain.Faulkner]

Lucky you! :-)

[jdoyle]

we had to do quite a bit of data tidying in SIMs to deal with duplicate contacts before running a variety of SLG training sessions for parents. Focused on parents who had email addresses stored in SIMs who had children in years 7 to 10.

 

We use ADP to auto create the ids and passwords and use a prefix to differentiate parents from staff and students. A big issue was the auto generated passwords. They are dreadful.

 

Parents were asked to bring photo IDs and to sign they'd been to the session at which point we handed over an envelope to them.

 

Stressed security of data, need to keep passwords secure and what the support mechanism was should they have any problems.

 

We haven't displayed all webparts yet but are slowly releasing them.

[pete]

On a similar note Pete: did you rollout the SLG to ALL parents at the same time, or did you phase this out i.e. year 7's first, year 8's second etc.?

 

We rolled out as the Parents Evenings / appropriate event that attracts the bulk of parents for a year came along.

 

Have any of you encountered problems with SLG parent provisioning? I'm concerned that our SIMS data might not be 'tidy' enough and that this will result in multiple logons for a parent if they have 2 or more children at the school.

 

You do need to ensure your data is correct or you'll be leaking data to the wrong parents (or parents will be missing kids). There is a checklist document and reports available from Capita as part of the SLG introduction.

 

We used the following to initially check for wierdness - the first is a Capita Report, the other two are user-submitted report defs from SupportNet that Capita reccommended we use:

 

Duplicate Contact Check

SITSS Correspondance Check

SITSS Parental Responsibility Check

 

We also have a couple of custom reports called ghostbusting (checks for things that shouldn't exist and will break SIMS when someone attempts to access the thing that SIMS knows can't exist, even though it does - usually manky data from .ctf files) and another that checks for students without parental contacts.

 

It was a fair amount of work to get the info up-to-date and I probably made a reputation as the data nazi in the school office (I created the "these are broken, here's how to fix them" reports and handed them over).

 

My initial basic, "is this a duplicate?" check was to sort contacts via phone number.

[CAM]

When you do roll logins out have someone nominated to troubleshoot access problems. Parents and secure passwords can be a very frustrating combination as they mistype them, can't find the symbols on the keyboard, use the other half's password with their login name, etc.

[jdoyle]

When you do roll logins out have someone nominated to troubleshoot access problems. Parents and secure passwords can be a very frustrating combination as they mistype them, can't find the symbols on the keyboard, use the other half's password with their login name, etc.

 

that's me here. Surprisingly, we've not had that many issues but it does come down to poorer keyboard/ICT skills with some parents and the poor passwords automatically generated by ADP. We set up a separate email address for parents to use when reporting problems. The separate inbox keeps it away from my normal emails. We hope to direct it straight to a helpdesk package in the near future. Parent communications is becoming a bigger part of my role.

[Kyle]

From what i can gather from speaking to other schools, the most important thing to start with is getting your data accurate and this is making a few schools local to me stall their roll out as they don't have the time or man power to do this as stage let alone the rollout.

[Greg]

I'd go for parents evenings, safer to give them out personally and you can overview/demo SLG at the same time in bulk. I assume that you're getting parents to sign AUP's so this is an ideal time for it, before account details are given out. Also manage parent's expectations of how and when (through school? in holidays?) they can get support before rollout to avoid issues later.

[Ecalpemos2000]

I rolled out our SLG to parents about 2 months ago, I had spent approx 200 hours ensuring data and links were accurate, such things as siblings etc. One mistake I made was to ask parents who wanted access, one or both parents, this just made work. The biggest issues are parents and the first passwords issued by the ADP. They are far too complicated for some parents.

 

We sent our final letters with username and passwords and I guess on the whole the response from parents as been really positive, out of a school of 750 pupils I only have 36 pupils who’s parents insist on postal, all in all a great success.

[le4ne]

We're also in a similar position.

Data has been tidied, unlinked contacts removed etc etc etc and now we're ready to roll SLG out!

 

We've had discussions about the best way of issuing usernames and passwords to parents/carers and also decided the most secure was was to do this at parent evenings. We plan to start small with parents who have shown interest in our digital newsletters and then grow the group until we release yeargroup by yeargroup.

 

We haven't taken any steps to prepare help documentation, AUPs, or setup training sessions for parents as of yet, but this is looming on the horizon!

[vikpaw]

Clean data,

Communicate plan to parents,

Phase roll-out, starting with small subset of techy parents if needed,

Two-stage issue of login details, maybe username by email, password at parents evening or later email,

Plan some support time / dedicate staff - also very good idea to set up 2/3 machines at a parents evening so they can do the login live, with support available (bit of overtime for the tech' too ).

[vikpaw]

This thread has some similar issues discussed, and a document regarding data preparation.

I think it's still valid, though there may be an updated version now, but i can't access SupportNet to check, due to bad connectivity.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/46761-slg-parental-reporting.html

[mdrabble]

Iain and Alan, I would offer some words of wisdom but since we are closing I am thinking why bother rolling it out.......

[Iain.Faulkner]

Iain and Alan, I would offer some words of wisdom but since we are closing I am thinking why bother rolling it out.......

 

That seems reasonable :-)