Office_Manager

Jonsi - We use PARS for out attendance and behaviour although would like to use it more for grading reports and what I understand,it is going Web based from January. I spoke to them a couple of months ago as we would like the facility to enable our teachers to enter grades from home rather than exporting to a spreadsheet and our IT manager having to import the data back to PARS as not all our teachers can do it themselves. We would use the facility via our VLE so the teachers can log on remotely. I have looked this up before about web parts and the easiest way to explain if i'm right is if you look at http://www.myspace.com you will see a webpart called 'cool new videos' another one called 'my space music'. Task software did explain to me (however it was a while ago and its late and my brain isnt working) that webparts are usually writen to work with Microsoft Sharpoint(?) but Task have written then to be used with any web . I do remember checking out costs for Sharepoint which is way above our budget so the fact that they will work with VLE is great. I'm not technical so sorry if I've used incorrect technical terms. If you have spoken to them before, give the PARS support desk a ring at Task, they are usually very helpful.

gwendes - you are also totally right about the registers. If using electronic registers, teachers need to make sure they are accurate and they cannot always be relied upon. Michealf - just read what you wrote 'The idea of having a tablet or laptop setup to sync the registers and then grab that in the event of an emergency seems pretty good since its not reliant on any existing infrastructure. The other idea my boss suggested was rather than printing off a complete register each lesson, simply to print off a list of absentees. This has the advantage of being much shorter than a complete register but can still be compared with a complete class list to see who is supposed to be here' Thats what our PARS fire does, you have just explained it better! the data is sync'd and you have a choice of seeing all registers or just a list of absentees.

We also use PARS fire module which has worked well on previous drills. All our teachers now take all lesson registers on our electronic PARS and this can be seen on a a PDA and taken outside during the drill. It has up to date registers which was important to us as we only used to have am registers printed out. One of you wrote about trusting wireless but it doesnt matter with the PARS fire because as soon as you enter the data on a register it is saved straight away with no overnight updates to SIMS so even though you are unplugging the PDA the data last entered can be seen without having to run the data from the live database wireless. Think i've explained that the right. Our biggest problem using a morning register paper based drill was if a pupil didnt turn up in registration, not in the line during the drill we couldnt garuntee that they hadn't attended any other classes during the day without asking other staff which clearly not a tight enough procedure. We could print off all the registers for all classes that day if the fire drill goes off however are we stupid enough to stay in a potentially burning building or paid enough to risk our lives. Electronic was the best option for us