bwfc_nottingham

All Our SLT are having a peek at SMIDReport a online cloud based tool for Assessment Analysis. Has anybody in the community used it and if so what are your thoughts / experience of the said product. I have had to upload some data (csv files of student / class / assessment data) to the cloud via an upload screen (which I hope isn't the way you do it in a live environment as the process depends on someone from within SMID processing the files on your behalf. Any info' would be most helpful. Regards , Phil

All Our SLT are having a peek at SMIDReport a online cloud based tool for Assessment Analysis. Has anybody in the community used it and if so what are your thoughts / experience of the said product. I have had to upload some data (csv files of student / class / assessment data) to the cloud via an upload screen (which I hope isn't the way you do it in a live environment as the process depends on someone from within SMID processing the files on your behalf. Any info' would be most helpful. Regards , Phil

+1 Geeky Dad , cracking post

Welcome George When I first started my job as a Data Manager (almost 3 years ago) , I was toying with the idea of trying to run SQL against the database. What you would need to do so is a sensible ERD diagram showing relationships between entities / tables, but no ERD diagram exists and you will also find that SIMS data does not appear to be fully normalised. I would shy away from SQL writing as like @bobsmith said your are entering a dodgy area and maybe voiding warranties / support by doing so (especially if you have an SQL userid that allows update) You can do some clever features with 'advanced reporting' where you assign an excel macro enabled template (utilising the auto open macro) to actually apply those macros automatically when you run your report. There are some serious weaknesses in the reporting package though e.g. (a) not being allowed to apply parameter substitution if you run the command line or batch schedule option (b) not being allowed to apply "system date / todays date" as a parameter when running reports (e.g. a report to show me all todays behaviour logs) and © the BIGGEST weakness is that once you drop down from parent entity to report two child entities e.g. a report showing behaviour and achievement logs for students, then the report writer starts doing Cartesian joins across the children entities .... a really frustrating feature. Don't go down the SQL log, just work with the tools you are given (albeit frustrating), after all this is a packaged solution and we are not developers / designers we are keppers of that data Regards Phil

Far be it for me to state on a public forum that a teacher has left their pc 'unlocked' therefore allowing a student access to their apps and data ! Regards Phil

Phil I look forward to the implementation of the audit trail (and others). Regards Phil

Phil I think you need to supply an audit trail on behaviour and on achievements as to "who deleted a record / and against which student". Someone deleted 4 students behaviour incidents just before the Christmas Break . The only way I could confirm this had happened was by comparing the weekly behaviour reports I run (and save the output as a named excel filed) against the current behaviour points on the database. It is major weakness in SIMS that many records have no audit trails. It should not be difficult to setup as you can do it by automated 'deletion' triggers that are activated on the deletion of ROWS on the respective database tables i.e. the SQL code on the trigger creates a new row in a Behaviour_Audit or Achievement_Audit table or whatever you are auditing...... just a few columns in the table.... student / date time deleted / deleted by user id / terminal id (I assume you have this somewhere) / keys to identify the actual record deleted ....jobs a good' un Regards Phil

Databird I am three years into a Data Manager's post is a secondary school (1300+ pupils) Y7 to Y11. My background before ending up here was mainstream IT (Analyst Programmer / Systems Analyst / Business Analyst / PM / contractor etc.), before I opted out of the industry to downsize my job, so I can understand you dilemma as you are now package managing a system rather than designing it. Like a previous poster, try and build some reports that teachers and SLT can run themselves (report writer is very powerful), but having said that I don't always practice what I preach and teachers don't seem to like taking ownership of running reports. We use SISRA, but there is quite a lot of time spent exporting and keeping data aligned. The most time consuming bit of my job appears to be setting marksheets up for the numerous assessments and plugging in new aspects and horrible colour codings in them. I don't know how you manage it on so many few hours (well you don't by the sound of it). I work all year round so half terms are great times for catching up on marksheet changes and setting up new academic year timetables is quite a busy period too. If you cannot get teachers to run reports themselves, then build yourself a good repository of parameterised repors (or read only marksheets), so that you are just a mouse clicks from delivering the data to them. Regards Phil

Linfit, Thanks for that We may only want it for Y9 , where the students do 'taster options' and Y10, for the GCSE options as these are the only two years that have 'options' . Does that make the process easier or more difficult oh and we have fixed option blocks, whereby students choose one subject from one of 'n' blocks (although I am not a timetable'r so don't necessarily know the ins and outs of timetable block setup). Regards Phil Regards Phil

Hi All Is anybody using Focus ----> Options in SIMS? The reason I ask is because one of our SLT appears to have chatted to another member of SLT in a school far away and the school far away said "Oh we use Options ...it's Fab" Well I have had a peek at the user manuals and it looks very complicated and very clunky. FYI : When we do new academic year timetables, I have when possible encouraged the use of SYLK files for putting students in classes and rather surprisingly the teachers quite like it and it works really well. I am a tad worried that somebody from SLT has this "whim" that school A does it therefore we should do it and hey presto I end up doing it. Any thoughts or your experiences of the said product would be most helpful. Regards Phil

Dan My only experience is as follows: Datasec were keen to come and demo at our school. I said I would be the first contact point for a demo and they had to get past me first (Data Manager) before demonstrating to SLT. They kept pushing to see SLT alongside me. I asked for some pre-meeting answers to some techie questions (how it integrates into our MIS i.e. SIMS, storing of duplicate data in repositories etc. and examples of previous successful installations) I cancelled the appointment when (a) I saw the techie responses and (b) discussed the techie responses with our infrastructure / Server / network team. Just my two cents worth.

I'd second Harry Monkey, in fact don't bother with a course, join a local camera club first, you will learn lots from the members, visiting lecturers and judges who visit clubs to 'judge internal competitions'. I've learned loads from my local club. Follow the link below to find a club near you . PAGB Member Federations Regards Phil

WORK: Well we are a SIMS school so it is all Windows IE, MS Office, etc. HOME: Ubuntu Firefox Thunderbird (open office email, but now I just use my browser for gmail / virginmedia) Libre Office (open source - office suite) GIMP (open source - photo editing) Rawtherapee (open source - photo editing) Darktable (open source - photoediting) Kdenlive (open source - video editing / AV's) do you somehow think I have embraced open source. The benefits of sharing knowledge with your peers is an excellent way to collaborate :0 Regards Phil

The goodthing about SISRA Analytics is that it runs via a browser, so you have nosoftware to manage on teachers desktops / laptops It's browser neutral too, so you can browsewith your preferred browser i.e. you are not dependent onInternet Explorer. Also works on tablets too, which is an added bonus to some. I am a Data Manager, so it is my responsibility toupload "Student Data" / "Assessment Point Data" /"KS2 Levels" etc. The data upload, can be a bit of a bind (boring), but I've built my own SIMSdata extract routines, so I have quite slick processes in place. Just remember though, that you now have two repositories of data i.e. your MIS(SIMS in our case) and SISRA Analytics, so you have to ensure both are kept inline. Remember too that as teachers are accessing via browsers, the data isavailable wherever they are (home, internet café etc.), so teachers have aresponsibility to ensure the data remains safe (although there is no real PIDdata held, other than student name) Exam Results Day can be a bit frantic as you usually have somebody hassling youto get the data uploaded into SISRA Analytics ASAP. The exam names /descriptions that you get from your SIMS exam data extracts are not the easiestto map to a generic subject i.e. "Maths" "Science""Geography" PE etc. especially when you have a few BTECS mixed inwith your GCSE's . Although the mapping process matching is more astatement on how SIMS handles exams results /descriptions rather than SISRA. All in all SISRA Analytics is well received in our school. Hope that helps

Hi All Our SLT are looking at changing the way some of our MIS systems work One of the drawbacks we have is that many apps built for schools are procedural rather than event driven apps. What I mean by that is they depend on the user doing something e.g. running a report, entering data in a marksheet, entering behaviour / achievements In an event driven application it is the event that triggers a process e.g. A detention is created for a student, we might want the creation of that detention to trigger an email to the students head of house, rather than running a report at the end of the day saying "these are the detention students". The event here would be "detention created", trigger process to generate an email. If a student is registered as attended for period 3, but they have no mark 15 minutes into period 4, we might want to generate an alert to the Attendance Officer warning them that we have potential truants, rather than the attendance officer running a report manually. The event in this case would be "time to check for truants" and the process would be alert the attendance officer (using whatever way we wanted to...report / email / txt etc) We are looking to try and find an package that supports event driven processes and schedules, particularly in the areas of behaviour and attendance. We currently uses SIMS / SISRA analytics Many thanks Phil

Vikpa, is there any chance of you sending me the output of the SQL . Our DBMS severs are locked down and I have no access. I will treat the data with respect d with confidentiality. I understand if you are unwilling to do so. Many Thanks Phil

Matt thanks for the reply, I don't have access to the DBMS as our servers are managed by Capita and locked down ! I would love a peek inside the database though

Phil I think you question raise a lot of issues. However, you show me an IT infrastructure in school, in industry , in public or private sectors that isn't dependent upon some bit of 3rd party software / hardware / network provider or service. There's always a weak link in any infrastructure that leaves your organisation vulnerable . I might also ask you how you define a cloud? Whether your database management server is down the corridor, the other side of school or at a remote off site data centre, then I would argue that your data is stored in a cloud. I think you probably ask the question because SIMS is a 'thick client server' application and you may be under commercial pressure and industry pressure to make it run through a browser. I say that with respect as I know the difficulties and culture changes you will face in moving forward. In the great scheme of things we are being pushed to cloud computing and like all things in life, organisations and individuals have risks in their choice of supplier for whatever bit of their IT infrastructure they are trying to support. You pays your money and takes your chance. I think we probably have other issues to worry about with regards to clouds i.e. where is the cloud, who manages it, who has access to it , is it going to rain ! (but those issues are relevant if the data cloud is down the corridor) I think I've rambled too much Phil

Hi All We have built a comprehensive set of Reports using the 'Design Report' functionality within SIMS. We've done some clever things with excel templates and macros. I did stumble on something yesterday which I think is worth sharing and may help you. I had a request to build a report which just reported certain achievements types for all pupils over the academic year. The reason for the request was to support 'rewards evening' and we wanted to identify the pupils who had gained most points in a subset of achievement types. So the Report was easy to produce Report Student with Achievements as a sub report i.e. Students ----> Achievements (filtering Achievements with Type and Date Range When I first built the report my filter read : where date between date1 and date2 (selected at runtime) AND Type is one of A /B / C/ etc (selected at runtime) When I ran the report for the whole year it just hung and hung and would not run. I then thought back to my days (not too long ago), when I was a Business Analyst / Designer and decided that 'Achievement Type' must be an index on the relationship between Student and Achievement and perhaps the Report Design package might generate more efficient SQL for the SQL Server database if I put Achievement Type type first in my query i.e. where Type is one of A /B / C/ etc (selected at runtime) AND date between date1 and date2 (selected at runtime) Well as Holly or Cilla would say "surprise surprise" the report ran in a couple of minutes rather than just hanging there. The morale of the story / posting. Well I think we need to think carefully as to the order of subreport filter parameters. I only thought of reversing the params, because if I was designing a database I would probably have made Achievement Type an index for the child record , so I thought maybe the SIMS designers had done so too (actually I would probably have made date a param too). Actually it might be worthwhile knowing what the indexes are for various entities in the report designer as this would influence the way we structured our reports. In fact is there any documentation out there that does this i.e. documents the indexes, unique keys etc? Anyway, I thought I would share this with you as knowledge shared is what the forum is all about and I have gained quite a bit over the last 18 months from the kind people in the user forum http://support.capitaes.co.uk/newforum/images/smiley1.gif Regards Phil

Matt The SIMS report setups lets you specify multiple recipients. Once we get the reports running, then we will add the respective staff to the recipient list. Focus ----> Alerts ----> Schedule Reports Regards Phil

Thanks steven, i am trying to run it via the SIMS database server....according to SIMS you can do this. My background is a Business Analyst and i am used to sophisticated batch schedules running on unix servers. I cannot believe how weak SIMS and windows servers are for scheduling batch runs. The way SIMS works is very weak - you appear to only be able to schedule one report event per day. I could use your method, but i don't want me to be a single point of failure. Our LEA support desk sre unable to resolve my problem Thanks for your reply Phil

Hi All I have tried to resolve this but failed and noone on the Capita forumn has a solution either, so I thought EDU GEEK might be a more appropriate forum to seek assistance, so here goes: I've built a nice little behaviour reort in the 'SIMS Report Designer'. Our SLT team want it run at 3.30 pm every day. I've managed the following with Batch Schedules (point 1 done by server geek team): 1) Set a windows schedule task to run the SIMS AutoReports.exe software on a daily basis at a given time 2) Gone into Focus -->Alerts --> Schedule Reports , to create some daily report requests - to be run by (1) above. 3) The daily reports from (2) to send output to me Now here's the QUESTIONS for you: - - After some jiggery pokery we managed to get windows scheduled task to run. - Windows runs the schedued jobs and says it finished OK. - NO output appears in my scheduled reports home page widget / panel. WHY IS THIS ? - - I cannot find where the excel spreadsheets from the scheduled reports have gone to. WHERE HAVE THEY GONE? Any tips or advice will be greatly received. BTW : The SIMS documentation that describes the setting up process for this is out of date and does not match what you actually have to do. Many thanks. Regards Phil

That's a good call re copy and paste vikpaw.......I know teachers have been cutting / copying and pasting comments .....the said teacher had told half a dozen pupils to buy the revision book at £4 and all those pupils lost the comment.... I didn't try to recreate the issue I just deleted the £ symbol and wrote pounds I've searched via google for special characters causing issues in word mailmerge and drawn a blank. Strange huhh. If I get some time over Christmas while the teachers are out of school I might try and recreate the problem. I don't see why a pound should cause the issue, so maybe there was a hidden dodgy character in the paste Merry Christmas Regards Phil

Hi all This had me struggling this morning for an hour We use assesment - individual reports for generating ROA's (we stopped using Profiles because it was so damn hard and inflexible). Anyway we have a "Comment Aspect" in the marksheet to capture teacher comments. One subject would randomly fail to display the "comment aspect" for some students. I thought it might be an issue with how I'd defined the ROA template ...word tables...and one cell having up to three comment aspects depending upon which 'course option' the student was studying. Anyway, I worked out what the problem was...the comments that would not appear had a pound symbol £ within the text (a teacher was telling parents about a revision book that costs £4).... I removed the £ and as if by magic the comments appeared BTW : The £ made the whole aspect comment dissapear not just the pound symbol I just wanted to share this with you in case it trips any of you up ! Does anyone know of any other characters / symbols that will cause an issue ? Regards Phil

I have exactly the same issue (I know this is an old thread, but I found it via google)...... I have no option to click on 'tools' when trying this option ! Any tips or ideas ? Regards Phil