[sims] Alternatives to Learning Gateway

[m19cpb]

I'm looking for a more parent friendly way of displaying data from SIMS - Learning Gateway works but is quite complicated for our parents

 

Is anyone using anything else?

[dnanton1]

Check these guys out:

CORE Education and Consulting (UK) Ltd - Talmos

They do a Sharepoint-based parental-engagement and lesson management systems which is SIMS-approved. My school is thinking of using their solution at the moment.

[beeswax]

Have a look at MyChildatSchool from Bromcom.

[teejay]

We use TASC Insight here, works really well and is very easy to set up, their support is first class as well. TASC Software - INSIGHT - Parent portal

[zag]

Yeh I've posted a few times about moving away from the SLG due to it being too bloated and poor interfaces. We've had it for 2 years now and hardly any parents use it.

 

I looked at a number of other products but nothing quite fits the bill yet so still looking at writing our own.

 

This looked ok though but it was expensive:

 

CORE Education and Consulting Solutions (UK) Ltd - TALMOS Parental Portal

 

TASC also looked good

Edited April 30, 2012 by zag

[SmithR]

Again we use TASC Insight here, works great and is very easy to set up we have all our students use it with there AD accounts daily and it automatically logs them in when they are in school.

All our staff have it intergated with there AD accounts.

Attached is a chart of parents that have logged in to give you an idea of our usage.

 

I agree their support is excellent.

[Sylv3r]

We use SLG and are happy with it, but if we didn't I would go with TASC also.

[PhilNeal]

m19pcb - what is the part of SLG that you'd like to be improved?

[m19cpb]

Thanks all for your comments, I will investigate the options

 

@PhilNeal - the user interface mostly, our parents say it does not look user friendly and it hard to learn so they stop going to it, they do like the information but do not find it easy to use.

[glennda]

I just implemented Zilink from schools ICT at my last place SchoolsICT | ZiLink for Moodle -simple SIMS and Facility CMIS integration with Moodle. The reason we dumped was becuase we where tied into our LEA's who made no effort in making it look nice and Capita wanted stupidly large amounts of money (5 figures, shock horror - Sorry Phil) for a product we didn't think was worth it because of the lack of effort from the LEA.

[zag]

@PhilNeal - the user interface mostly, our parents say it does not look user friendly and it hard to learn so they stop going to it, they do like the information but do not find it easy to use.

 

Yep exactly my thoughts.

 

All the bloat of SharePoint just confuses our parents. Especially the ones on mobile devices.

 

We've even had capita "branding" our site which we thought would help but all it was, was a banner. That didn't help to sharepoint usability issues at all.

 

Our regular users are less than 5% now after really pushing it last term with online reports,electronic letters to parents and instant attendance graphs.

 

I'm amazed to see those 60%+ adoption rates for the TASC software, that's incredible if you can keep it up.

Edited May 1, 2012 by zag

[winng]

We are hoping to drop the SLG later this year as it looks a tired and dated interface being based on an okd sharepoint system. Our favourite alternative at the moment is BromCom's My Child At School with Teachers Web Folder. Together these will cost less than the annual charge for the SLG.