[sims] Does SIMS have a web portal?

[pmdc199]

Can sims provide online reports (pdf or whaever) that parents can access to view their childs progress behaviuor etc? Is it user friendly?

[arthur231283]

Sims have something called sims learning gateway SIMS Learning Gateway for Secondary Schools | capita-sims.co.uk

 

This allows parents to login and see details on there child

 

We are in the process of installing and setting it up at the moment

[SHimmer45]

does it actually put it in a friendly manner, we used it a while back and the opinion at the time was that the tables of data you could display just were not friendly to look at.

The reports you can create in SIMS for child reports looked much better, or even being able to access a published PDF through slg would be better than the nasty tables it showed (it has been some time since we used it)

[teejay]

Have a look at TASC Insight, much cheaper than SLG and in my opinion and that of our parents it's much better.

[Max_Power]

You can publish the report in SLG as a PDF and it will look how it does if you were printing them.

 

Depending on the person or how complicated you make it, people will either feel that its easy to browse and use the site and others wont. It uses sharepoint so it has a fairly straight forward layout but depending on what you add and how it can be a little bit difficult to navigate. Weve rolled out to around 700 parents and most have completed a survey about use of site, navigation and possible improvements etc and only a handful said they found it difficult to navigate.

[zag]

Can sims provide online reports (pdf or whaever) that parents can access to view their childs progress behaviuor etc? Is it user friendly?

 

Yes they do its called SLG. But don't bother with it, its horribly un user friendly.

 

Try TASC insight. Its excellent for online parent reporting.

[SHimmer45]

You can publish the report in SLG as a PDF and it will look how it does if you were printing them.

 

Depending on the person or how complicated you make it, people will either feel that its easy to browse and use the site and others wont. It uses sharepoint so it has a fairly straight forward layout but depending on what you add and how it can be a little bit difficult to navigate. Weve rolled out to around 700 parents and most have completed a survey about use of site, navigation and possible improvements etc and only a handful said they found it difficult to navigate.

 

i couldnt see how to get SLG to display exported PDF's (does it do it on the fly or only if the report is run in the school and then published)

[Edu-IT]

I echo the TASC Insight comments.

[glennda]

Yes but i wouldn't use it! As mentioned above others are a lot better.

[Max_Power]

i couldnt see how to get SLG to display exported PDF's (does it do it on the fly or only if the report is run in the school and then published)

 

In SIMS.net we do routines > SLG> publish documents - you then get a menu of what you want to publish, be it reports or grading letters etc. Select the users you want to publish a report for, give the document a title and academic year its relevant to, and then select the format which can be a pdf or word document.

 

Thats more or less it and the report becomes visible under my children dashboard. Parent logs in and see report.

[alfatec]

Don't see what the problem is with the SLG. We have it rolled out to over a thousand pupils. All online reports and data collection is done online saving

a lot of money with regards to using paper and admin time. Navigation through SharePoint is dependent on how you set it up that is why we host

the system ourselves. Once bought, it costs very little in annual maintenance fees to run. We surveyed our parents and were complimented on the

system. Suppose you cannot please everybody.

[glennda]

Don't see what the problem is with the SLG. We have it rolled out to over a thousand pupils. All online reports and data collection is done online saving

a lot of money with regards to using paper and admin time. Navigation through SharePoint is dependent on how you set it up that is why we host

the system ourselves. Once bought, it costs very little in annual maintenance fees to run. We surveyed our parents and were complimented on the

system. Suppose you cannot please everybody.

 

My Main points against it was

1. Our initial setup was terrible as done via lea centrally hosted. Looked awful and wasn't used.

2. When we were moving away capita wanted 13k for setup and then about £1800 a year

3. its built on Sharepoint which is terrible anyway

4. more cost effective solutions are available.

 

I could go on

[zag]

Yeh, once you use TASC insight you realize just how poor SLG really is.

 

Just as an example there is no need to publish reports to tasc insight, they automatically appear.

 

Tasc insight also costs around 1k just for comparison and is a far better system all round

 

Just for the record we have used SLG and Insight in our school.

[reggiep]

+1 for TASC insight. The support from TASC is amazing too.

[PhilNeal]

@glennda - I'd be grateful for more detail on the "£13K for set up" as I don't understand where that figure comes from.

[Steven_Cleaver]

Another one for TASC and Insight parents can view students reports in PDF format both present and all past reports. Staff can view information for students including reports and we have recently given students access to this so that Parents, Staff and Students have access to the same information although have configured slightly differently for the different groups and what shows when for these groups for instance for staff upto date attendance for Parents one week behind etc.

You not only have access to reports but Attendance, Behaviour, Assessment and Exams all this can configured easily to what you want for each group of users just ticking\unticking a few tick boxes.

1. The interface for users is very easy to use and navigate also looks modern.

2. Very, very reasonably priced and no expensive initial setup costs.

3. You can link students into AD so they use same Username and Passwords they use at school again fairly easily.

4. Staff use their SIM’s username and Password.

5. Excellent support from Tasc software.

 

A couple of schools in our LEA even changed systems once they had taken a look at Insight in the school.

[Quackers]

Go for Insight from Tasc Software, we had the Sims Learning Gateway its over priced by a long way, and no where near as good as Insight.

 

Insight is just an extreamly good quality product, really well made and supported. If only more educational products were made to the same standard. Never dread having to get in contact if i need help with Tasc like i do some other companys.

[glennda]

@glennda - I'd be grateful for more detail on the "£13K for set up" as I don't understand where that figure comes from.

 

was the inital purchase - setup and configuration, plus first years maintenance. im afraid i dont have access to the figures anymore as i left the place it was. if you want to invesugate further i can give you the first name of the person who quoted and also the school name.

 

in the end I went for Zilink

[Sylv3r]

We are another happy SLG school here and have been for 3 or 4 years. I have seen the TASC software and also like that too though.

 

We've got all parents for our 1,500 students accessing their Son / Daughters details from work home without any problems and have had some great feedback from parents. Our staff also did not have access to the SIMS client from their workstations until this September and have carried out attendance, tracking, behaviour and profiles student reports via the webparts. The reason we also gave them access to the SIMS client also is that SLG does lack some of the functionality such as being able to generate class set photos / exporting tracking sheets into excel, but I am sure this functionality will come.

 

A lot of people don't like sharepoint - I wonder if this is where the hatred of SLG comes from as the webparts do work well - I agree sharepoint is clunky and ugly looking if not managed and skinned properly - this is what we've done and are very happy with it and our sharepoint install with web parts is our school VLE - providing online access to students to the lesson resources and multimedia via document libraries.

[zag]

was the inital purchase - setup and configuration, plus first years maintenance. im afraid i dont have access to the figures anymore as i left the place it was. if you want to invesugate further i can give you the first name of the person who quoted and also the school name.

 

in the end I went for Zilink

 

Yeh our SLG cost over £10,000 to buy as well. It was a COMPLETE waste of money.

 

TASC Insight is better, cheaper, easier to use, more features, easier to upgrade, nicer interface, quicker, easier to log in, easier to provision. I could go on

 

It cost £1,000....

Edited November 9, 2012 by zag

[PhilNeal]

@glennda yes please drop me a line [email protected] as this price is way over what it should be and is more in line with what we might charge over 3 years for both the parental & staff side of things.

[glennda]

@glennda yes please drop me a line [email protected] as this price is way over what it should be and is more in line with what we might charge over 3 years for both the parental & staff side of things.

 

Just dropping you an email now. Its rather vague tho as I don't have the figures to hand having left.

 

EDIT: I have found the Figures and 13k was including 2k's worth of VAT. The total price quoted ex VAT was still near 11k. Have sent over to Phil.

Edited November 9, 2012 by glennda

[teejay]

Just dug up the pricing for when we looked at SLG self hosted, the figure we were quoted is similar to what @glennda has said. We did have SLG hosted by Capita for a while, but ditched it due to the number of problems we were having and moved to TASC Insight hosted internally which has worked brilliantly. Capita really could learn a thing or two from TASC about how to provide a proper level of support.

[vikpaw]

@glennda - I'd be grateful for more detail on the "£13K for set up" as I don't understand where that figure comes from.

That's easy to reach, especially the revised cost of 11k. between 4-6k for licensing, then compulsory installation and training days at 1k per day. Add in solution planning which is a complete waste of time and results in a basic template document with your schools name on top, then some other extra time required. You pay for a day, which is only really 6 hours, and includes time for the installer to write documentation.

[Steveduk]

That's easy to reach, especially the revised cost of 11k. between 4-6k for licensing, then compulsory installation and training days at 1k per day. Add in solution planning which is a complete waste of time and results in a basic template document with your schools name on top, then some other extra time required. You pay for a day, which is only really 6 hours, and includes time for the installer to write documentation.

 

+1 for TASC

 

We are ditching our self-hosted SLG soon in favour of PARS & Insight. SLG breaks at every update and as previously mentioned is horrible to look at and was very expensive to initially set up.