cacmcgoo

got one as a trial for school last week. dissapointing.touch screen was tricky to use, frustratingly so really. up against an ipad for same trial duration and have been using the ipad more and more - completly turning expectations of two devices on head. rm felt like an unfinished job. Have been 'anti-apple' for ages but am now seeing what people are on about (for this particular test).

thanks to all for your opinions and interesting advice. I will never use the word hate again!

Well firstly I'm loking at SIMS from a users perspective (i.e. a humble teacher), I'm not a data manager or similar. And I suppose hate is too strong a word. But I do find the useability of sims a bit frustrating to say the least, 'non-intuitive' would cover it. I think I'm a bit anti-capita too - I had the misfortune of extracating a school from a miss-sold VLE package made by Capita. I get the same feeling whenever I'm using SIMS - this could be better! I just think that for general day to day teaching use, its a bit inflexible. Its also expensive, and this goes back the the VLE experience- the school I worked for then was paying an awful lot for a system that didnt do what it should - and the move to Moodle was a blessing in that particular circumstance. I guess what my first posting was intended to do was not seek help with SIMS issues, but really explore wether there are any viable alternatives: 1. Save a significant ammount of money 2. Be user friendly enough to make the re-training/re-integration simple/smooth for your 'average user'. 3. Keep the functionality which I will never have a full handle on, but which the data experts need. thanks to the previous two responses- I'm always overwhelmed and grateful that people take the time to offer advice in such a friendly and timely manner. to sum up,(and its probably more illustrative of what I'm getting at more than anything) if there was an equivalent product to our Moodle VLE that might be an option for a school MIS, then I would be interested in exploring it...... I hope this last bit makes sense. Tom

would like to chip in about Moodle- its ace. ICT department runs through it (all class work, assessments, homework, tracking etc) helps pool our resources, printer gathering dust etc etc. Great. Had a capita effort before, utterly rubbish, researched around and went moodle. Has been super, and other departments beginning to get on board after a year of me plugging away and promoting. Don't know where I would be without it frankly. Has cost the school next to nothing and seems easy to maintain/host in house (although thats not my bag).

hello all. I've been reading this thread with interest. I hate SIMS quite a lot. Are there any viable alternatives at all? If anyone knows of any options worth researching, can you share?