Dancer

There is a deal with missing marks in attendance/lesson monitor. I'm pretty sure you can click on the top of the column and assign them all to N

Att Present AM - NO lessons Year 7.zip For SIMS Attached copy of a report I use to look at who is present in the AM session and then has an N or O code in a lesson (why it called NO lesson). Doesn't list the period. You can add the period info through the period ID - In system manager the user needs to be a member of the Third Party Reporting group. Also look at predefined lesson monitor reports Reports/Lesson Monitor/Selected Student Reports/Lesson Absences Reports

I looked at this a couple of years ago and one of the sims partners (Vericool i think but I can't find any info on the website when I just had quick look) had a product that linked to personel and produced id cards. The offering is focused on biometric identification of students so it was quite expensive just to produce id cards so we didn't go with it.

I've uploaded a slightly newer version of the xls file I use. I create one template for each year group (here - Y7 art template, is the same as Y7 History etc apart from one has art aspect the other history). Export this template. Place the xls in folder along with a text document that contains the bit between and including ... which is saved as OrigTemplate.txt. The folder also contain a blank text file called NewTemplate.txt - You can include the header text and opening of the template node ("" - part of the new version of the xls closes the tempalte node) in the xls Line 1 - is for your own reference Line 2 - contains the name of the tag Line 3 - the orginal text contained in the tag in the exported template that will be replaced by Line 4 onwards - the text that will replace that in line 3. Each line form 4 onwards is one new template External IDs - no you can use sims to create a new one - I use HHS (intials of the school) followed by a number which I manually incerement up to ensure it is unquie. The orig tempalte worksheet is just a demo template - you need to save the text of the tempalte in a text file called OrigTemplate.txt in the same folder as the xls (sorry for the confusion) To create the origtemplate strip out all the other nodes. I create all the aspect/resultsets/gradeset etc in sims first. When you import the new templates back into SIMS you don't need the other nodes as the aspect/resultset/gradeset already exist. If you are transfering the tempaltes between installations of sims (i.e. the new school in sept) you will need to include all the nodes. The new xls file allows upto 33 columns to be changed and yes you need to list each aspect and column heading. The macro is a simple find and replace so changes all ocurrances in one go. Each column must have a unique heading and is independent of the aspect name - May be worth, when setting up the orig tempalte changing the column heading so they don't reference a subject so don't need changing for the new tempaltes. Formulas reference the column number (As MattMitchell said) - change the aspect in the column and the formula will continue to reference that column with the new aspect. I too have just tried to list all aspects used in a template and it doesn't want to do it(template focus - aspect sub report). Weirdly - if you focus the report on aspect with the tempalte sub report (filtered for the relevent template) it works! Hopefully that cleared up your queries, feel free to post again if it hasn't. FRA.xls

Once exported – You can open the xml file in notepad/xml editor of choice. Although I have a template for each subject in each year they all follow essentially the same pattern. So I create a template template (one for each year) and open in notepad and do a find and replace. The templates reference the aspects/resultset etc using the external id (either run a .net report to list them all or one by one from the properties of the aspect/result set). You may also need to change column headings and you will need to ensure the template name and ID is unique. I have created an excel spreadsheet with a macro that automatically opens a file and does various finds and replaces (on support net go to file sharing resource 619). It did mean that last summer I could create 200 new templates in 3 days (manually it would of taken me 2-3 hours each) You should be able to create resultsets and aspects in the same way. I have tried a couple of times with aspects and failed. As compared to templates relatively few and quick to set up, I just do these in SIMS. Most of my resultsets were set up years ago and the odd new one is easily done in SIMS When editing the template I delete everything apart from the template node as finding and replacing the resultset/grade ids in the resultset/grade node can causes problems.

When you export an assessment template to xml it takes the aspects, gradesets, resultsets associated with the template. If you read xml file you should have a resulset node, gradeset node, aspect node in addition to the template node.

Not as sophiscated as Vik's but I export the tempalte then do a find and replace in notepad on a resultset external id. This changes all of resutlset X to resultset Y I find it easiest to clone the template and export the clone and only reimport the template node (not resultset node) I did post in file sharing on supportnet (619) some excel VBA code that relatively quickly allows you to do many find and replaces on xml template to produce many templates. i.e. able to create a tempalte template for one subject then use the vba to produce the same template but for many different subjects. I'm no coder and its pretty simplistic but if is of use to any one please have a look. Doesn't get round the main issue that creating/editing/maintianing templates (particularly with formulas in) is a slow and tedious process.

As a SIMS user I feel that SIMS actually does quite lot of analysis within both Assessment and Performance. Aspect Analysis quickly calculates A*-C etc for every subject in any assessment Resultset anlysis allows the tracking progess within a subject across many assessments Group analysis allows access to many different groups Chance analysis is great for monitoring levels progress, stalling students, comparing against targets etc. My main complaint that it is essentially me who prints out a load of tables from performance and distrubute them to HOD/SLT etc after each assessment and that it would be very difficult to extend its usage to the average person who uses the data. This undermines the data mining capabilities. I'm starting to look at tracking grids which means that much more is setup before hand but are relatively easy for the relevent HOD/SLT to run. And the wierd filters where some fields are available in some filters and not in others (I think already been mentioned in this thread). You can set up a group analysis and then filter the groups on SEN Status but not set a SEN Status as a group. If I remember correctly you have different fields if you set the group filter on a marksheet template and in an indivdual template.

Surely the purpose of the finger print is to identify the student.

Thanks Dos_Box Will add a requirement to have written agreement on how the data will protected and used to the schools data protection policy. Is it enough to just to accept these assurances?

We transfer lots of data with lots of other companies/organistions. I've yet to find a company that dosen't tell you that they fully comply with the data protection act and your data will be completely secure. but what checks (due diligence) do you carry out prior to transfering data that all is secure and above board? Often decisions have been made to transfer the data before it gets to me to do and when I ask questions about the organistations and their security I get vague answers and told to get on with it. Does anyone have a "checklist" I could issue to senior/middle management to use when signing up to transfer data?

If you use NT4 for photo reports Nova has a photos folder that has all the student photo stored as bitmaps with the filename as admission number. Depending what you need copy the files out and use a bat file to rename them

I have created a .net report that lists all students who study a subject in a particular year and then an assessment grade for a particular aspect/resultset combo. Then a macro in the report template (excel) deletes all those students with an assessment leaving a list of those without. I did upload copies of the report and the template to file sharing on support net last year (702 and 703) You have to run it for each subject aspect/resultset. I have produced a list of subjects and the related aspects for each year, which I quickly work down. The report is based on subject code so have to watch where more than one course is taught to a subject e.g btec science assessments are recorded in a btec science aspect and gcse science another aspect but bot are taught subject code sc. Meaning you have to manually remove the classes not involved. When I'm chasing up missing assessments, I also use reports on marksheets used today and results entered today to quickly monitor whats going. No silver bullet I admit but relatively quickly I have a list of student missing assessments and can start hunting the teachers down to enter them.

The final bullet point BECTA are going to consider is the remote hosted solutions. To me this seems slightly like them concluding that remote hosting solves many of the issues about transfering data between establishments/children services listed above it before they have carried out the review!

When ever the schoolcomms/truancycall et al arise I generally feel that Truancy call is damned by the faintness of it praise whilst schoolcomm users are much more impressed. We have used truancycall/callparent for getting on 6 years and all the praise I can give it is that its ok. Never having used schoolcomms I can't compare directly but main difference is that TrunacyCall can send a voice call to parents about an absence whilst schoolcomms can't. An earlier post said they went with schoolcomms because they wanted to move away from calls to text, we on the other hand want a phone call that parent respond to - horses for courses. My biggest criticism is this We want them to link to MIS (I would say it essential in all but the smallest school for first day calling) but We have been texting sixth students (not thier parents) long before schoolcomm/callparent offered this functionality (we had to create a UDF to store the number in as the MIS didn't have anywhere to store student numbers back then). So we used (and still use for the sixthform) one of the many internet based sms services not linked to an MIS. These have a lower cost per text and no other fees (either to setup or ongoing - we choose to pay a small fee to have a number students can text us on) and it provide a much better user experience. The big issue is we have to keep running reports from the MIS to keep the contact DB uptodate, this works fine for 6thform - 1 student 1 phone number. Ideally I would like to (in a simlar way to mailmerge reports) direct out of MIS with the full reporting functionallty - we text parents of students who were put in detention to inform them. This is done by someone hand picking the students out the list of all students and sending a generic text. This is done by producing a report of those given a detention yesturday, the report also is used to produce a letter home - how much easier if the report also sent the text with some info on why and where etc(admittdly within the character limits)