Bev

Hello all I work in a small Middle school School: 320 - Year 5 - 8, which means we split KS2 and KS3 MIS: SIMS and Assessment Manager Data Analysis: SIMS and Excel We use FFT data, and track from entry to exit, which doesn't neatly fit into a Key Stage. We have a mess of a setup, the person who posted about wanting a clean system to start afresh hit the nail on the head. I started 4 1/2 years ago with a one day Assessment Manager training course, and I've just made it up as I go along. For the most part what we have works, however our LEA developed a tracker that they encouraged us to use last year. I imported all their aspects/templates etc into the system and bit the bullet trying to work with it, however, being a middle school we just don't fit into either a Primary or Secondary box. Now I have about 3500 aspects ni SIMS, of which probably 150 are relevant. My currect task is to identify the useful ones, and ignore the rest. My biggest headache is reporting - our teaching staff don't have access to SIMS, so all data is entered via Excel spreadsheets which are imported. It's tedious and prone to errors. I've been looking for an alternative for a few years, but I've not found it. This is only a part of my role, I'm also the ICT Technician and can often be found wielding a screwdriver trying to repair a broken machine.

We have one of these on my daughters ipad M-Edge | Products | SuperShell It seems pretty robust, but it does make it harder to attach the cable for charging.

Picasa picks up any photos or videos when you attach the ipad, ImageCapture works for photographs but I haven't tried it for Videos. both are free.

We've just taken delivery of 8 ipads. We already have 4 in school which are used by a different department. The original 4 are all linked to a single Apple ID and purchases have been made using giftcards, however, now that we're getting more I want to get everything set up correctly. Can I just run through what I think I understand. I have applied for the Volume Licensing Program. That requires 2 Apple Ids? One for the Manager, and one for a Facilitator. Then the actual ipads are registered to a third AppleId? I've set up Meraki, but this is where I'm getting unstuck. I've downloaded a certificate and uploaded the Apple Push Certificate - but I'm a bit confused about which apple account that certificate should be linked too. Is it the one I've used to apply for the Volume Licensing, or the one that I've put on the iPads? and finally Whilst I am waiting for the Volume licensing account to be set up, can I install free apps on the iPads, or will they all need reinstalling when the volume license gets sorted out?

Is there anyway to deploy apps without having to enter the password on each machine? I've just got 8 ipads at the moment, so that's not too bad, but I can forsee a situation where we end up with 30 and I didn't expect to have to enter the password on each one? I assume Meraki would just send the app out.

Mine has started doing this today as well. We haven't actually had Chrome installed very long (since October), so I presumed it was something Chrome did and for the moment we are just hitting cancel when it pops up, but I need it to stop.

That's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you

I want to buy some more digital cameras, and ideally I'd like to find a storage container with 10 compartments, so 1 camera per slot, and if a camera is missing it would be immediately apparent. Does anyone use anything like this? It doesn't need to be fancy or padded, just a divided storage box.

I'm looking as well, but as we are a middle school I don't believe we will find anything that works for us unless we write something from scratch.

We have been doing this with Google Docs, there is a form option on there that is very easy to use.

I use Picasa at school and we don't upload anything to the web. I also use it at home, and it only uploads what you request is uploaded. There is no automatic uploading of anything. In fact, you don't have to be logged into a gmail account, and if you aren't logged in then it would have nowhere to upload even if it wanted to. I use it at school on my PC and it works great, however, it's not brilliant across a network. If I tag events or pupil on my PC, then those tags do not appear across the network. However, the basic folder structure is available across the network, and the basic editing features are excellent. If you are finding info about Picasa online, then that's picasa webalbums (now replaced by google+). You just want normal Picasa.

Hi I'm not sure that this really fits the Edugeek remit, but as this ICT technican gets asked about anything that involves a computer in the sligthest way, then I shall pass that query on to you all. I do the school newsletter (amongst many random non-technician related tasks), and I'm looking for some decent, education related, clipart to make it less bland. I use a lot of Discovery Education stuff but it's all very American and not always suitable. Any suggestions? I'm prepared to buy something (inexpensive) if it's out there.

The word limit is a big problem. We also have a problem with ? appearing when we import comments containing dashes or apostrophes. You can't do a search and replace if a teacher has misspelled a word in 300 reports. It's not a 'text' editor - that's not it's function, which I understand, but for the quantity of text I deal with on these reports, it becomes a major issue. 320 pupils, 15 comments per pupil, that's over 4500 comments. They are all entered into Excel and spell checked but the bulk of the editing happens in SIMS as I've found if I export and reimport I introduce more mistakes (and more question marks)

We have plenty of data, that's not an issue at all. I produce reports, spreadsheets, graphs, you name it. If anything, I think we possibly have too much data but that's another debate for another time. We had Ofsted in January. We had an issue with the amount of progress made, but not with the amount of data we had to prove that lack of progress.... Our problem is primarily with the collation of the end of year comments. SIMS isn't designed to work well with text, that's not it's primary function, and I understand that, but we produce text heavy end of year reports, and we need a system that can cope well with those comments. SIMs isn't going away, we will continue to use it as the main repository for all our data, but it does not provide what we need to effectively enter the comment data.

I think that's more of an issue in a larger school. We know our kids pretty well here.

You see my problem! Exporting classlists once, and importing completed and signed off reports seems much easier. I had better go and do some work on the corrections, rather than whining on here, but thanks for your comments, it has been interesting. I am the sole ICT Technician/Data Technician in a middle school (which adds another layer of complexity, neither a Primary or Secondary solution fits neatly). There is a limit to how much I can change singlehandedly. I would have support for a system that solved the he/she problem and substituted names correctly as staff hate those issues. And they would absolutely have to be able to work at home, as many of them have to do 20+ sets and they don't have the time to do them at school.

It's not on our server, I think that's the problem. It's on the LEAs server.

Sims is provided by the LEA on a Citrix device, and logon's to Citrix are charged at £200, I have no idea why. We all use dedicated machines for access to Citrix, so I actually have 3 machines connected to my monitor/keyboard, Citrix, Server, and a PC. It's not exactly a seamless solution! The other problem is that you can't put a memory stick into the Citrix machine, so all data has to be emailed back and forth to the machine with SIMs on it. Staff submit spreadsheets via a shared folder on the server, then I email them to the citrix machine, download them onto that machine, and upload them to SIMs. At some point in that process I lose all my apostrophes and they turn into question marks! As I was typing this, the head just appeared, so I mentioned getting all staff onto SIMS and he basically said no, it will never happen.

So, assuming SIMS isn't available to staff (since it isn't, and won't be) Are there any alternatives? Just telling me to use SIMs isn't helpful, because we do that now and it doesn't work very well.

Can you staff access SIMS from home, or do they write their reports at school?

Our staff have never had access to SIMS. The school secretary, the deputy head, and myself (ICT Technician and general data dogsbody) are the only ones. It's not something the staff have ever needed, and they charge £200 per logon so it's never been encouraged. I can print out reports for proofreading, the problem lies in entering the corrections. I have a stack of reports on my desk with corrections on, but it takes me hours to do them. I've got a marksheet with every comment on it for each child, but it takes ages to open/save each marksheet. I just find the system completely unwieldy. We also have issues with ' and - turning in to question marks when the marksheets are imported/exported. I spend many hours looking for question marks, and I can't simply do it in Excel with a search and replace, as they turn back into question marks when they are reimported. And also comments over 1000 characters long get cut off.

I am just wondering how everyone does their reports? I do ours using Assessment Manager in SIMS. On the surface, this is fine, it can collect the data and produce a nicely formatted report. However, the staff don't have access to SIMS, so I export marksheets which they complete and return to me, and then we go through a number of rounds of proofreading. It is really cumbersome to enter the corrections within SIMS, and if I correct the spreadsheets, I end up with multiple versions of everything and a complete version control mess. This is probably due to my organisational skills, but it's becoming a problem. I'm also the only person who can use Assessment Manager, so if I go off sick their is noone else who can use the system. Anyway - the point of all this, is I am thinking we need a better way. I would really like something online, so anyone can enter their reports/proofread/edit from school or at home. Does anyone know of any systems before I start googling?

Thanks for your help, the LEA have unblocked it, and it appears to be working now. I would have never thought of even checking that.

Unfortunately, although we are a middle school, we use the Primary school filtering, and it's across the LEA so we don't have access. We could get our own Smoothwall box, but we are a small school and it's not something that's been a priority.

that;s exactly what was happening. I've reported it, so hopefully the LEA can allow it, they are normally pretty good. It was just strange that it wasn't consistent.