Linfit

Changing the cycle should not affect the bands at all - bands are independant of where they are scheduled. If you are adding a period at the end of a day, it should be possible to do this without breaking the existing schedule. I think the problem would arise if you were trying to insert a period in the middle of a day, when you would get problems with broken double periods.

The important thing here is that the two groups of students are mutually exclusive - they can take a full course OR two half courses. To build this in Nova you need two bands, one for the full course students, one for the half course students. You then create a block in the full course band containing all your 10 period subjects and allocate them all 10 periods each. In the other band, you create two blocks, each containing the 5 period courses, allocating them 5 periods each. You can then shedule the 5 period blocks to fit at the same time as the 10 period blocks across the two week timetable. If you are trying to fit it into an existing band structure which is determined by other factors, you can acheive the same thing by using sub-bands of an existing band, but as we don't use these here I am less familiar with their implementation. For the carousel issue, you can do this in the same block, you just put 8 periods of English and 2 periods of PSE in the block for each class. - this assumes that the PSE classes contain the same pupils as the corresponding English classes.

It finds the Discover Client from a line in sims.ini, which is usually in the Windows folder (although it may only contain a a re-direct to one on the server)

PConsole - excellent. I always thought the documentation was really good, and it looked impressive, all those red books on the shelf. Our first SIMS system ran on Netware back in the DOS days: later we ran a Windows setup with the workstations booting from rom and downloading windows from the server into their huge 4Meg of RAM. all on coax ethernet: we couldn't afford structured cabling, so everything was daisy chained around the office, where someone always disconnected a lead or lost the terminating resistor and stopped the network. Those were the days - proper networking: none of this patch panel and wiring cabinet malarky !!

Make sure you are standing on a soft surface when they tell you the price......

Ah. I don't know a way of doing that in SIMS directly - I would normally export into Excel and do some shuffling to get that format.

Thats Reports>Timetables>Student Timetables The chooser gives you a list of all pupils on roll and you can just pick the ones to print or save out to disc.

Its 2 I'm afraid. Unwanted and unloved subjects are tricky to get rid of. You can try deleting, from Tools>Setups>Subjects, but if they have ever been used in anger anywhere they will be lurking in the system and usually SIMS will find an excuse not to delete them. If you don't care about historical data you you can sometimes "repurpose" them (ie re-use them for a related or even unrelated subject that best fits your new naming schema) but there are issues with this as well. The only option is to mark them as inactive as at least then you can filter some of the browse lists so that they don't appear. You also need to be careful with staff codes - if there are mismatches between staff codes held in SIMS and the ones in Nova SIMS will simply ignore the classes for those teachers when the timetable is imported, so you will end up with an incomplete timetable.

Some of these are easy, and some of them harder. The select additional columns functionality in AM covers some of them, but some would require appropriate Aspects to be created in AM first (f the data was not already in the system)and populated with data. I think you might struggle with the Medical info, and also with Last Years attendance - attendance to date in the current year is easy to do, but from a previous acacademic year, I am not sure how you would do that. The alternative is to use the Student List Reporting functionality. This would be an easy way of doing hardcopy lists with most of what you want on it - its easier to get the medical information on from here but you would struggle with attendance and assessment data.

We don't issue the results of indivdual students to the local press, only the aggregated figures.

I don't charge because its worst case a trip to the exams store and look up the records in a filing cabinet. I am finding (I am the Exams Officer here) that more and more employers (especially public sector) require exam board paper work and will not take the schools word for it. Its one reason why I go on and on to our older pupils about the need to look after their certificates, as dealing with the boards has become an expensive business. If you did GCSE's with all three boards (entirely possible in many schools) thats three seperate requests and its going to cost you over £100 and take quite a while.

You need to set up the blocks in the curriculum model screen. Select the year group you require, and look at the way the blocks are organised. If you have PE divided into 2 blocks, you need to delete them, and then create a new block in the top band and stretch it down so that it runs across them both (Its CTRL/Right mouse click). You can then just put one PE class in the whole block, and staff that accordingly in Classes screen. Once the block is built, you can schedule it and then add any additional staff for some of the lessons from the block screen.

To be fair this is a pretty standard request by many employers. We have data going back to 1990 in our system but only really on-roll and basic name info. If they want exam results from that far back we may have them in paper records, but we just refer them to the exam board web sites. Most employers or colleges these days will want to see the original certificates, and if they can't provide them they have no option but to contact the exam boards.

If this is always the case with this subject, the elegant way to do it is to change the underlying blocks in the curriculum model so that the block goes across the year group. This will allow you to assign one class to the block with one teacher which will have all the pupils in that year group in it. Its more awkward if the situation you describe only occurs for some of the lessons. In that case, one solution would be to still only have one bloc and one class, but assign other staff to some of the lessons from the block screen. If they are assigned to the block they should not be removed by any other bit of the software unless you explicitly do it.

Alis_Klar, they put in a small server - actually a rather underspec Dell workstation, and some screens when it was first fitted. Our building was demolished - the screens we re-used, the computer wasn't any use for anything so we junked it. There was never any suggestion that the hardware was not ours. The system we had there was no intelligence in the screens - they were bog standard TV's with point to point VGA using signal boosters. I don't think this is the only way they do it though, as when they came to look at our new building, as I mentioned previously, they were talking about video over Cat 5, although they also talked about a system with a small PC at the screen end, so they may use a variety of different approaches.

This looks like a permissions error. If you are running Nova from within SIMS using a network install does the user have the appropriate permissions on the SNova folder on the server ?

We had this until our new build was finished. It always seemed to be a bit flaky, and I was never very impressed with the content. I must say the kids weren't that impressed either, and after the first few days just ignored it. We had 4 screens in the dining hall reception and library. It seemed an expensive gimmick to me and there are far better things to spend the money on. Since our new building went up we have had a new digital signage system and we just junked the Life Channel box, re-used the screens for the new system, and no-one has missed it, except the DH who insisted we buy it originally, who eventually got me contact them. I said to them if they could get it all working on our network without messing up our switch configs or running any cables (can't just lift the ceiling tiles, all has to be firewalled and certified) they were welcome to try. Guy came in, looked at our building, said he would get back to us, and we have heard nothing since.

If you want to do any form of progress monitoring over time, say the length of the course, or do regular reporting to parents, its much easier to use result sets rather than have hundreds of aspects. We have dicovered this by trial and error over the last three years and are in the process of revamping our system and we are moving from a system where we had lots of aspects and almost no result sets to one where we have many fewer aspects and lots of result sets. We report every half term, so rather than have aspects for each reporting session, we will have one aspect and six result sets, one for each reporting session. This then makes it easier to use things like analysis grids to measure performance improvment over time, as you can do things like plot one set of results against another very easily.

Vikpaw - Yes, of course YMMV - its part of the bundled costs we pay to our SIMS support unit at the LA, which includes training, support etc, as a single line budget item. I was forgetting support and payment models for SIMS seem to vary widely across schools (and indeed countries !)

I would have to agree that Nova T6 is not the most visual or intuitive package, and the interface does look rather tired compared in particular to Timtabler, but for SIMS schools its essentially free, it does have all the functionality you need, and it integrates well with SIMS. Doing it all in a spreadsheet first is prone to errors in the transfer of data and leaves you open to having several conflicting versions of the timetable floating around: never a good thing. One big plus point is if you make frequent changes or want to plan ahead for known cyclical changes, Nova does also give you the option of Maintenance Data sets and the associated and wonderfully named "temporal locks", which allow you to get future timetables into the system in advance. Regardless of the software, understanding the principles of timetabling is more important in the first instance than the particular features of the package you are using.

Ours is registered with Zen Internet - £30 a year and DNS, MX records etc all controllable from a web interface.

I am the timetabler here (biggish 11-16 comp) and we use T6: we are scheduling ours now for next year (I work in conjunction with our Curriculum Deputy). It is a steep learning curve, and it will help if you get to grips with the basic timetabling concepts; even for a small school this will help make the timetable efficient and it will be quicker and more intuitive to make changes. It is worth it though as the benefits of the SIMS integration are enormous and its a useful personal skill for the CV. There is a good book on the subject: Free trial : timetable software ... for timetabling school timetables ... for easier scheduling. which is very good at covering the core ideas (although it is not Nova Specific) and might be worth the school buying. I am not a teacher (anymore) and I think the process works better if its done bytwo people: you can bounce possible solutions off each other, there is some redundancy if changes need to be made, and if a teacher or SMT member is involved they can have all the awkward conversations with staff about why they have double RE with the Engineering group last thing on a Friday afternoon.

Does your school insist on a standardised format for lesson plans and lessons ? Here teaching staff have a fairly standard lesson format on their paper based lesson plans giving objectives, content, plenary, extension materials etc. They are very big on signposting learning here and making it clear to pupils what the purpose and objective of what they are doing is. Of course, your MMV, but if there is such a thing at your school, staff would probably appreciate a consistency of approach. That was certinaly the case here - we use Frog, and somewhat adapted the basic template to fit in with our standard approach.

We have used Pugh on and off for years. They are not always the cheapest, so its worth haggling sometimes, but they seem to supply virtually everything and the education people there seem pretty knowledgable about licencing issues.

We use Cover on 64bit windows. It is one of the slower bits of SIMS - it always has seemed to be; we were a field trial school back before it was first released and it was like that then. Loading the daily cover screen, making edits, its generally quite lethargic. Moving to 64 bit from 32 bit XP made no noticable difference in daily use. Its just the nature of the beast. The only caveat I would make: is the rest of SIMS slow on that machine - if so, you might notice an improvement if you upgrade the hardware. I suppose if you are upgrading the hardware anyway it makes no odds - if it helps things its a bonus, it it doesn't its beyond your control to do much about it.