number34

I'm in full agreement with the others on this, they look great. Put me down to have a trial as well please.

If you click on/look at the picture you will see that I have changed the permissons for the Class Teacher group so that all staff can view all mark sheets from Focus>Assessment>Marksheet entry. It works well here.

We have just had a demo of this package Learning Plus UK Webinar - Using our Tracking & Monitoring Tool - YouTube, It is far superior to SIMS AM when viewing the data but I do not want to duplicate everything we have in AM to be able to use it. Has anyone had an success in importing data from SIMS?

You can use the same heading when working at template level but you cannot when defining the aspect so be careful. The other advantage is you can create a template for Art Y12 with all the Y12 result sets then you can clone it, rename it Y13 and replace the result sets. This is very useful when you have a lot of formulae.

You can edit the column heading in the template so that the confusing ~1 etc can be removed. Also if you use result sets that appears in the column heading and therefore makes it easier to identify.

Hi, after latest SIMS upgrade we are on Version 6.24 Build 17.

Correct, I am the SIMS & Data Manager.

Surely user defined templates are not saved in a temp folder? A temp folder could be wiped at any time..... As to fixing My Documents here it is on the network and I'm not technical enough to know how to fix it, any suggestions?

Vik, problem was with a virtual server not being able to access the network storage and it took two days to resolve. I could run SIMS fine just not reports. It seems strange that a temp folder needs to be in my documents, why not use the local temp folder? Peter

Matt, I wasn't clear enough, sorry. I know it uses My Documents but I would like it to use somewhere else if possible.

We have had network problems and I have not been able to run reports as my tempSimsRpt folder was inaccessible. Is it possible to alter the location of this folder, perhaps to my local drive?

Matt I notice that support ceases from the Spring update but are you also saying that they will remove all links to it as well? I mean from the focus menu and also the export routines in NT6.

Graham, I am accessing server/network as a whole although when using 2X I am limited to what has been set up. When using Logmein it is just as if I was sitting in front of my desktop PC. Should add that I have licence for Logmein Pro.

I access in a roundabout way using the 2X and Logmein Ignition apps on my iPhone and iPad. As I am effectively using a session on the server or using my desktop remotely the issues are more related to my internet connection, have found it can be very poor on 3G. That said it has been very useful when I have been away from school.

I looked at profiles but decided against using it because a) we do not use comment banks and b) because it required too many clicks. The mark sheets show all relevant assessment data and the comments are easily viewed via the F4 key (although I would like to be able to change the text size!) The main weakness is the ability to view and edit the completed reports.

If you have a lot of data in assessment manager then why not use it to do the reports? We have used it for all reports issued to parents for 6 years now and have found that it works well for us. Do all your staff have access to SIMS though?, it would be too complicated to work if you rely on the xml spreadsheets.

We use INSIGHT from TASC and have a link to it from our VLE\webpage. It takes all of its data from SIMS and we are very pleased with it.

It looks very impressive when first used but it needs a few SIMS polishes, eg show % and remove options not applicable to the school. I gave a demonstration to our pastoral leaders earlier this week and they liked what they saw. Have not managed to sort out the AM7 setups yet and will get back to you when I have.

Running Windows 7 on all of them.

It runs fine on my desktop - Dual core E5200, 2 gb ram & ATI 5400. Also fine on laptop - Toshiba Satellite Pro i3-2310M & 4 gb ram so perhaps you have a problem unrelated to the machine? (It is awful on my netbook!)

Hi Emma, we don't use graphs here but I'm sure Sivadam will have some information on that! We do use a lot of grades, targets and colours in our progress reports and they look quite good but really you need to think about the data you collect first and then think about how to display it if you are going to change from a traditional report.

Morning Vik, I did think of doing it by KS but wanted to have years 7 - 11 in one distinct group. A separate KS3 and KS4 did not do what I wanted in Discover. (An aside - I found that defining my own Discover group containing years 7 to 11 was next to useless) As to tiers I could really do with sub-tiers with Year 7 -11 having KS3 and KS4 below and then the years attached to the Key stages.

'Student totals by tier' is one of the options from the Pupil icon in Discover. In this 11 -18 school I have recently defined two tiers, Years 7 -11 and Years 12 & 13. I did this because I could not find a way of looking at attendance data for pupils in compulsory education in a straighforward way and I am sure I will find other uses for the tiers.

To do the above you may need to change the permissions in SIMS System so that other teachers mark sheets are visible from Assessment>Marksheet entry

I fully agree with bossman about TASC. We use their PARS application for lesson registration and INSIGHT for online reporting to parents. The first writes all data back to SIMS and the second pulls it out of SIMS, this does not depend on any overnight refreshes either. It does cost approx £1 per pupil per application per year but we did buy a new server for INSIGHT. The only thing we do not have is teacher access to SIMS but that is not an issue here at present.