andykemp

Generally these types of external journal sites are accessible via a service called Athens... Ask your librarian about it as different Unis sometimes deal with this differently

ICT Manager An exciting opportunity has arisen for a dynamic and self motivated ICT professional with excellent management and communication skills, to work with the School's ICT Development Group to help develop and then to implement the ICT strategy. Leading the ICT Team, you will manage all aspects of the ICT services across the whole School supporting 1,300 users with 600 attached devices using thin client technology. You will work closely with the academic leaders in each part of the School to meet their educational needs. You will have relevant ICT/network qualifications and experience of managing a large network, preferably in an educational environment. Competitive salary package dependent on experience. Please contact the Personnel Department for further details and an application form, 01823 703123. Email: [email protected] Closing date for applications: 6th May 2011

Well I have made some progress, digging through the Maintain courses menu, I noticed that these 'Free' courses which need to be removed are entered for the wrong dates (they were entered at somepoint as 01/09/2011 to 05.09/2011)... I currently enter the timetable for next year as 06/09/2010 to 31/08/2011... My guess is at some stage they were entered as 06/09/2010 to 05/09/2011, but that these bits are the left overs from when the dates were changed to be 06/09/2010 - 31/08/2011 Does this make it easier for me to remove them? Cheers Andy

Well I tried forcing the classes to merge on the curr match page, but it wouldn't let me... I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'timetable could be sent for the whole academic year'? When I send the timetable to SIMS I do so for the dates covering the academic year (i.e. September through August...

Thanks... I'll have a go at forcing the two to merge. The other think I thought about was manually removing them from the Tools | Academic Management | Course Manager | Maintain Course menu... It's possible that the original course were entered with a different date as I only took over a few days ago as our previous timetabler has now left...

The classes are still listed in Curriculum Assignment by Scheme (but have no teacher), and are not greyed out. There are also no students assigned to these classes...

Hi everyone, I'm new to using SIMS and NovaT6 for timetabling but getting there! However I have one problem, having updated the timetable and moved a few classes from one block to another when I export the Timetable into SIMS, the curriculum matching wizard marks the old courses on the left as being 'Free', and leaves them in the curriculum plan... It created new classes in the correct block, which is great! But I now need to remove these extra classes which still exist in the SIMS Curriculum Plan, but no longer exist in NovaT6... I'm sure there is something simple I have missed! Any ideas? Many Thanks, Andy

From what I have read, you go back to the timetable in Timetabler that was imported, make the changes here then export again chainging the timetable dates to start from when the timetable changes... The only complication here is that changes that were made in SIMS (rather than those that would normally be made in NovaT/Timetabler) will not be copied back and so must be updated in both. Whereas NovaT would make a maintanence timetable which could be adapted... Apart from that the process looks to be the same...

vikpaw - I am interested to know why you moved from Timetabler to NovaT. What it because there was something that Timetabler couldn't do that you needed, or was it due to other external pressures? I have seen a few comments about the lack of combing charts in NovaT6 (from what I can tell they were in NovaT4), and there absence (as they seem a very sensible checking process) is another reason why I was considering Timetabler. garrysaddington - I looked at FET but as far as I could tell there was no way to get the timetable from FET into SIMS.net which meant ti would not work for us...

Just to explain to Sivadam why I am considering an alternative package to NovaT. As I am coming in fresh to timetabling, I have no experience with any particular package and whatever I do I will need to learn something. I am well aware of the complex (dark-art) that is timetabling and have already read several books on the theory of timetabling including Keith's book the Timetabler's Cookbook which I found very useful (and would encourage anyone new to timetabling to read as it gives an excellent overview of the theory from a mostly platform agnostic point of view). So at this stage I have to choose between NovaT which we already have (but hasn't been hugely successful these last few years since we added IB alongside A-levels making the process more complex). I am not saying that is the fault of NovaT, it may well be that we just don't know how to use it to its best. However as the basic introductory course for NovaT would cost us over £1K (including VAT and travel), it seemed prudent to see if there were alternatives out there that might do the job for us... My concern with NovaT, is having had a tour of the software from the current timetabler and having read 'Making the most of SIMS.net - Timetabling for School Effectiveness'; and skimmed a few hundred pages of the manual I'm still finding it hard to see how it all fits together, and what it all does. That's not to say that it isn't a very powerful solution merely that I find it's approach more difficult to comprehend. I think part of it is being a Mathematician (and Head of Maths) I quite enjoy the puzzle of doing the timetable manually, which is how I do the departmental allocations which are very complex. I'm certainly not saying I would want to do the whole timetable with a peg-board; but I like following the logic of the decisions and I found it hard to see why NovaT made some of the decisions it made - which in turn would make it difficult for me to explain to staff why I made those compromises rather than other ones... (Again I am happy to say that this might be because I don't know NovaT well enough) Whereas when I worked through the demo version of Timetabler, I found the process very clear, logical and intuitive. It felt much more to me like an automated version of a manual approach - all be it with a lot more sophistication than that - but this meant that I felt more in control of the situation, and felt like I was making the decisions not the software. Having spoken to several other timetablers, at other independent schools they have also found Timetabler to be an excellent solution for their needs. And all of them highly rate the support that Keith provides; which I find highly appealing as being an independent school we don't have any support from the LEA, and Capita support can be quite costly. Our timetable structure isn't ridiculously complicated; but like any school it has it's complications and knowing there is someone I can phone/email to ask advice from is an important safety-net when you are new to the process. Given that the cost of Timetabler is less than the cost of just the basic NovaT course, it seemed like it would be silly for us to not at least consider it as an alternative solution. Sivadam - If you think I have misjudged the situation, and can advise why I should rethink NovaT, I would be happy to hear it...

I think you might be slightly exaggerating what I said! Having spent several hours reading books on the general approach to timetabling including the Timetabler's Cookbook; and being a through and through mathematician I found the process in Timetabler more transparent and appeared more logical to me (very much my personal opinion). When I said I could teach it to myself how to use the software I had in mind a figure a bit larger than 2hours!! If I can find a large enough beer mat, I'd be quite up for this approach... Maybe someone should work on a import routine for SIMS!!

Not in anyway associated with SalamanderSoft, but I remembered reading this on their website: SalamanderSoft Limited - Redirect Web Part Not a free solution but looks like it does exactly what you are after...

For hosted I would would certainly have a look at OPENHIVE...

Worth also looking at OPENHIVE, and Scholaris. StudyWiz claim to have webparts for their VLE to allow integration with SharePoint And there have been some attempts at integrating Moodle with SharePoint as well which might be worth looking at...

I'm definitely interested in the potential here... One other area I would love to see if the ability to email the teachers of a particular student from within moodle (as it isn't possible in SIMS)... Any chance this could be added?

Did a little digging and it seems the reason none of us can find it is that it was included in the release that came out yesterday (7.124)! Capita Education Support Services Digging through the release notes p16 says: "An additional option has been added when sending a message to filter by those teachers associated with the students today" So I guess when this gets installed (which will probably be Christmas) we shall see if it will do what I need!

I don't have that role listed - what version was this added in? We are running Independent School Version 7.122

Glad it's not just me it doesn't work for!

Thanks for the help - We are using the independent school version 7.122 (build 21) and I cannot see that option under student view 'send message' - Are we running an old version or has it not made it to the Indy version yet? I get the following options: Head of Year, Reg Group Tutor, Head of House, Sen-cos, All Heads of Year, All Reg group tutors, All Heads of House, Teachers & Non-Teaching staff

There is an all teachers option - but that lists ALL teachers not just the teachers of the student which makes it no more useful than the standard email 'all staff' option... When you get a chance to check I would appreciate it...

I found the send message box - but it just gives me a complete list of all staff to choose from - I don't want to have to choose the teachers as I don't know who they are otherwise I woudl have just emailed them... What I wanted was an option to send a message (although I would have prefered an email) just to the teachers of a student without having to look them up... Am I doing something wrong?

Indeed - desperate to find a better solution then either 'all staff' or spending 5mins working out who the teachers are everytime...

Email (if setup well) is no less secure and much more convenient then accessing messages in SIMS. That said I can't work out how to do this with SIMS messages either - They have a send message tool - but there is no option to select just their teachers... If you have any insight into this though that would be much appreciated.

I have been hunting around in SIMS for the last 30mins or so trying to find a way to 'message' or preferably email all the teachers of a particular student without having to look up their timetable and workout who each person is from their initials and the find their email address etc... Please someone tell me SIMS can actually do this simple enough task, and that I am just being daft!

Does anyone know any helpdesk type products which can be integrated in to moodle? For integration I can live with supporting LDAP authentication and being theme-able... It needs to be flexible enough to handle ICT help-desk requests and Maintenance type requests and keep them separate... Would prefer something OpenSource if there is something (But would consider commercial) and don't mind hacking some PHP to get it working nicely... Thanks Andy