Linfit

We have been looking at these and was very impressed looking at one at BETT. We are seriously considering using one of these to transition our Citrix VDI cluster which is currently spread over three Dell 720's. They really seem to me to be a an impressive product, and I think Dell are underselling them a bit as they seem to be targeting the "branch office remote site no space for a proper server room" market. I'm pretty much committed to getting one for us to install over the summer.

Could have been - it warns you in the manual that creating a new academic year loads the server heavily and should be done at a quiet period.

We have used the small Lenovo S models and found them very good, less than £300. 11" screens but perfectly usable.

Cover is designed to allow short term changes to the normal operation of the timetable. As well as being difficult technically to implement, as the timetable is actually created and maintained outside SIMS.net, you would have timetable changes being created by the software daily and would end up with many versions of the timetable in the system. As a timetabler, I can say definitively that this is a BAD THING. One timetable, edited by one timetabler - any other way lies anarchy.

Rooms shown as free in the Free Rooms Report are ones that are not timetabled - that info is pulled through from the timetabling software. Its not dynamic, so if one of those rooms is used to move a class into using cover the timetable shown in free rooms does not update. The only way to see which rooms are actually free at any particular time is by using the cover module - the list it uses is dynamic - but there is no report for this, its just on the arrange cover screen. We do all our room changes in Cover, but when we had spare ICT rooms in our old building, had a separate system for booking these rooms (ours was based on a shared calendar). I suspect that is the way that most schools do it.

Timetabling is a bit of a black art, and most timetablers evolve their own methods of working over time which can seem weird and downright illogical to someone who is just thinking "Do it on the computer". Its also difficult for a timetabler who has been doing it a while to change their approach,(for example by shifting software) because they are focussed on writing a successful timetable and time spent learning new software is seen as wasted or introducing extra work. You often find that schools only switch software/strategies when they get a new timetabler. To answer your question though, I use Nova and find it perfectly adequate:we are medium sized secondary which has been through new builds, and school amalgamations in the last few years. There isn't anything we have had to implement that it won't do, although some creative thinking can be required. But I also make extensive use of spreadsheets and almost always have to resort to pieces of coloured card on a wall at some stage. If you want to learn Nova the only way to really learn it is to actually construct a timetable, and a good starting point is to take the current timetable and replicate it starting from scratch - this will get you familiar with the screens and it avoids having to focus on the scheduling part, which is the hard bit. If you are going to actually write a new timetable, an understanding of the concepts involved and the preparatory work required is vital. I would strongly recommend a course, but the Keith Johnson book mentioned by VikPaw is very useful and easy to follow. As to the Nova/Timetabler debate, I think Timetabler is updated more often, with new features added, then Nova is, and has a more colourful and configurable interface. But it costs. If you are a SIMS school, Nova is already there.

And they have just released a new version anyway....

Thats interesting - we offer HUP and I would say well over a third of our staff have taken it up. It is an absolute bargain for the price.

Out of those I would go with WSUS - its not that complex to install, easy to test and a useful thing to be able to implement.

No I don't think thats possible. You would have to split the block into separate classes so that they appear that way in Academic Manager and you could then remove the one pupil from one of the classes.

This seems to be a known issue - I had it with some of our BTEC courses but not all. I was advised by our LA support that if the patch didn't work (it didn't) the workaround was to use Edit PI.

It also breaks Emerge - we have been warned not to install it until a new Emerge release is made available

Reading ages and learning styles would likely be stored as aspects in SIMS so I can't see a way of making them visible on the main register screen. Is it possible that he has been at a school where those details were on a linked marksheet accessed from the marksheets tab on the register screen, and thats where the confusion has arisen ?

We have the following free to anyone who wants them and can collect (we are just North of Manchester) JFS524 24 port 10/100 switch x7 JFS516 16 port 10/100 switch x6 GS724T 24 port 10/100/1000 smartswitch x2 The 10/100's have come out of Laptop trolleys and have never been used. Anyone who wants them PM me please.

Our Yr 11's had their accounts locked on our official leaving day (last Friday in June) and the accounts will be deleted over the summer (no sixth form). Staff leavers remain active until their contract end date - nominally end of August for most, so they get the summer to make sure they have copies of the data they need and to tidy up their user areas. User folders are archived off during the summer and then deleted completely after a year. I will also spend a day or so in the summer having a general tidy up of our Staff Shared area, VLE etc, just organising and removing stuff that gets renewed each year anyway.

We are a new build and virtualised almost everything. I think that your first instinct is right and with virtualisation tech the way it is now would very much go along the "one server one job" route. Just one thought though, we have two virtual DC's but we also have physical DC located in another part of the building with a switched off DHCP scope set up- it doesn't need to be anything fancy (for a long time ours was an old Atom based work station) but it gives you an extra level of protection inre-building your network or jusry rigging something if your lose your physical hosts or have some issue with your VM storage.

SIMS related jobs are often advertised on Supportnet - you should be able to get a login if your school uses SIMS and you do not currently have one.

That depends on your LA - ours stops at the end of the summer term. However, by around now the data is likley to be changing very little: everyone should know who is going to which school, and you actualy need only a very small subset of data to put a student into SIMS - name, date of birth, that type of thing. Of course, if your school is like ours one of the main sources for updating information is the admission form, which our parents complete when they come to an admissions evening which is the same day as our New Intake Day. This might be another reason why your admissions officer is hanging on.

Ahh. When you get the ATF's is going to depend on your LA. We have had ours since mid May, and then we get weekly updates on changes, but I don't know if this is typical. If your LA is slower, or the data has to be pulled from a variety of feeder schools, at your end, I can see that it might be later - but it can't be too late: because otherwise how do you sort out forms, teaching groups etc before the start of term ? I suppose the other point to consider is how your admissions officer deals with the process. If he/she has prelimary info but is holding out for more complete data, like KS2 results etc. They may only want to do the ATF import once so they are waiting until they have the most complete data set. (You can import ATF data repeatedly and the data just merges).

OK. So you should have details of the pupils who are coming to you in Sept in your SIMS system in an appropriate pre-admission group and this data will have come as an ATF file from the LA (if you are an LA school),which the SIMS manager/pastoral person should have imported. If you are not an LA school the data might have come in as a variety of CTF files or been typed in maually or a mixture of the two - I don't know exactly how it works for schools who are their own admissions authority. Once the potential pupils are in SIMS they need to be tagged as "Accepted". This is the step below actually admitting them. Your school or LA will specific rules about actually officially admitting them: for example we do not admit pupils until we have physcially seen them on the first day of term. Once they are accepted they then appear in the various other parts of SIMS - in particular you can assign them to Forms and teaching groups, once next years timetable has been imported. We use Cunninghams and Biostore but we do not enroll the pupils on the system until the first day of term - that is until after they are legally admitted.Last year we set up three tills and got through the whole year group (200) in about an hour and a half. We intend to do the same this year and will do it as almost the first thing when they get with their form tutor: the form tutor takes a register and the pastoral staff admit the pupils who are physically present in SIMS, so that when they come to us to be scanned they exist on roll in SIMS and they can then put money on the system before lunch. We use Wisepay, but pupils are told to bring cash to feed the machines for the first few days.

You can put them in Personnel and give them a start date of 1st Sept. We put in only the most basic information to start with, just enough so that SIMS doesn't complain and lets us save the record. This will allow you to add them into Manage Classroom staff for the next academic year and assign them a working pattern and a timetable code in SIMS, which must match the one used in Nova. At that point you should be able to export the timetable into SIMS without it complaining.

They'll still need someone to: Glue the tablets back together when the kids break em Order new chisels and sharpen them when they lose them. and we can assume that in that situation Apple will produce a tablet (sorry!) which will not be compatable with the standard chisels and will require extra support.

The read only flag is set when the column is first set up. If the column is set up as for Data Review, it will be read ony -as opposed to a column for Data Entry. As far as I know, this cannot then be subsequently changed (unless you delete and then re-create the column). It does not make the underlying data read only anywhere else in the system, it just makes it uneditable from that particular marksheet column. This is a feature to allow you to present data to staff without giving them the ablity to edit it (at least not in that place).

This might be a date issue - was the language field edited before or after the census date ? You can check using the History button on panel 8. If the edit date was after the census date you will need to drag the slider so that the historical data was correct on or before the census date.

OK, I have this info in my head as I am the timetabler here, so: 998 pupils (11-16 Mixed Comp) We have a two week 50 period timetable, all lessons are one hour. 3 IT staff, IT Dept teaches (from next year) Business and Info Systems GCSE, Comp Sci GCSE and Cambridge Nationals IT course. IT is not compulsory at KS4, students have a free choice. For next year, we will have: KS3 - 2 one hour IT lessons per fortnight. We have 8 classes in 8 and 9, 6 in year 7, so thats 44 IT lessons required in KS3. One of our IT staff also teaches 4 Business lessons per fortnight in Year 8. KS4 Year 10 - 5 lessons per fortnight each of Business, IT and Computer studies. There are two IT groups, so that is 20 lessons. KS4 Year 11 - 6 lessons per fortnight for 6 IT groups, thats 36 lessons. So we need 104 lessons teaching in the IT Dept. Our Head of IT, as a HOD in a "Smaller" Dept is expected to teach 40 periods out of 50 per fortnight, 2 of which are PSE for his form, so he teaches 38 periods in the Dept. One of the other IT teachers is a Head of Year, they teach 36 periods per fortnight. The other is a mainscale IT teacher, they teach 42 periods, 40 of which are IT (again, he is a form teacher). So we have 114 periods available in the Dept this year. The Dept also has a specialist HLTA who works only in the IT Dept supporting pupils in IT lessons. To be fair, I would consider our staffing generous, but even so, you seem like you are getting a bit of raw deal there as you are so involved in the tech side as well.