beeswax

I think you'll find that curry and beer will solve most problems

I would have said this too if I hadn't been called away

you might try looking here

which art college was that then?

there is a plasc converter tool on the installation cdrom under Tools>plasc utility which will convert your .csv file to plasc. Page 17 of the Pupil and Test Management Guide will tell you which fields you need. You'll also need the SEN field - check this, as ours wasn't filled in correctly. anyone who needed SEN had a code, but those who didn't were left blank, they should have had 'N'. The guide says that ILA can be left blank, it can't. we were told by RM to put in a median value of 5 as this can be changed later. when the file was first converted and imported an extra 2 blank columns appeared before the ILA column pushing the ILA data into the wrong column. we opened the file in excel, added 2 blank columns, converted and imported again and it work. hope this helps. beeswax

"Perhaps we should hire some graphic designers for the CSS and layout hehe - do you think the school budget would stretch that far" I had just this conversation with our Head the other day until I told him how much a private company I used to work for had charged a school. He wished me luck. The site's almost done and can be found here you can't link to anything yet, but you'll get the idea. The biggest problem is getting information from heads of faculty.

ey up

not a discount, but if you come up to the edugeek conference on the 19th april I'll get you lunch. beeswax

for me, if it's a school website then it's copyright such and such a school full stop. for private/business websites I still say copyright that company or individual and then add a ....website design by..with a link beeswax

@SYSMAN_MK: such a simple design and yet so effective. the quality of the images goes a long way to improving the look of the site as well. I think joomla and mambo are still pretty interchangeable aren't they? beeswax

we refuse to do it here

show us what you've got

this might do the job

that must be a lot of beer

I've reached a point where I've successfully imported pupil data into the APS, which is about two thirds of the way thru chapter 3 in the Pupil & Test Management Guide. From there on in the waters get a little murky. Chapter 4 has Allocating Pupils to Registration Groups & Teaching Sets, chapter 5 Setting an ILA for an Individual Pupil and so on. Some of it's clearly a teacher's duty, and some, such as importing pupil data, is my job. I'm not sure I want to be involved in the details of individual pupils. anyone any thoughts or guidance on this? beeswax

just a quick heads up on what happened and how it was resolved. 1. the person who was filling in the SIMS data for pupils' SEN needs was only inputting a code for those pupils who were in need of SEN, and leaving the column blank for those who didn't need it, rather than inserting an 'N'. This was quickly resolved. There was a second invalid column, ILA, or Initial Learning Assessment, which again couldn't be left blank. As there was no way of adding this in SIMS, the data was opened in Excel and the extra column added with a value of 5, which is the mean value for ILA. The file was converted to plasc and re imported, and voila! the ILA column was blank again, though now the pupils had been added and I can move on to the next stage. It seems the ILA column values can be altered later, but something has to be entered initially. I registered the problem with RM/QCA and they were on the phone to me within 10 minutes. beeswax

ran the updates last thursday/friday. been onto the APS server and stopped and started postmaster + tomcat. it imported my first csv file (where all the fields were valid) immediately giving me exactly 0 pupils, 0 subjects etc.

ok, I tried to import plasc data this morning. some of the details were invalid and only the valid data had boxes ticked, so the little professor in me clicked next to try and reach the Merge Summary Details stage, and there it stuck with the progress bar at about 50%. anyone here come across this? beeswax

it may be sunday night, and the whacking hangover from last night's party, but doesn't installing DPS uninstall previous versions automatically? as far as I can recall this didn't take long at all, perhaps 5 mins to uninstall and re-install. beeswax

yes, did it thursday night friday morning. ran the APS patch and it took about a minute (reading the instructions took longer). then did the DPS on each individual machine in one room (30) early morning. after the first install/update just checked that all was working as it should. it was, so carried on with the rest. replacing the DPSconfig.ini in the zip file actually seemed to work. this week will try to set up tests for a group from Y9N. beeswax

you do realize that with the current number of members, 729, and the maximum 6 figure number, £999,999, that works out at £1371.74 each. no way am I selling my soul for anything less than £5000. beeswax

I think you have to download the tests to the laptop from your APS server, then you need to set it to run in disconnected mode. I haven't tried this for myself, but this is the fall back if the server should fail any time during a test. beeswax

I think you've hit the motherload there broc

as the staff here use hotmail, and pupils are allowed to send work home, or download it from home, it's a constant battle to see who's legitimate or not.

Last Friday I was aked by our head of ICT to keep an eye on all the it suites (using netsupport), take screen grabs, put names to offenders, disable accounts etc so that they could be then be printed out and sent home to parents/guardians. it was a "crackdown", and as I had nothing better to do (ahem) I played along with it. I'm still getting the fallout from it now 6 days later, answering parents' queries as to why little so an so has had his account disabled, and don't you know he has to get his coursework in on Monday etc. there'll be another "crackdown" in a few weeks to ram the message home. anything that can save me from going through this again I would welcome, though I don't hold the purse strings here. beeswax