Gorf

Hi, folks. I've got a fortnight testing a short-throw projector - which gives 50" to 100" when placed 10cm to 44cm from the screen (tabletop only - cannot be ceiling mounted unfortunately). I've been promised 30 pairs of active 3D glasses so I can test the DLP's suitability for school, however I've seen elsewhere on this forum that the 3D aspect of these things tends to have a short lifespan before users lose interest. Is there anything available to showcase 3D in the classroom? If it's something that we aren't likely to invest in long term, I don't want to be buying software or media that will eventually end up gathering dust. If I want to make my own media (I can do my own 3D animation work), do I just make the video as a side-by-side for each eye? It's a Philips Screeneo, if that makes any difference. Thanks for looking

I'm just going off what I've been told - as far as I can tell, SIMS is already set up and has a regular user-base among the teachers. The tradeoff we are accepting in order to promote homework logging is that we will remove the current requirement to log attendance on a per-lesson basis. The idea there is that homework will be set less frequently, so even though it's a bit of typing it should actually reduce the workload (especially if they can copy/paste their homework plan). The eventual idea is to replace the need for parents to sign a student's homework book by emailing them a weekly summary of what's been set. At my meeting with the DHT yesterday, he was agreeable to the use of a zero-point score in the achievements. This would then be reported to a CSV and that data linked or copied to an Excel template which generates the emails. The fact that we're using an external script in the form of VBA suggests to me that the whole lot should be done outside of SIMS, but the DHT thinks it will get a better buy-in if the staff use a system they are already using.

I think the way the DHT does his Excel reports is to output the bare minimum as a flat file and then reference that data from his all-singing XLS sheet. I'll ask him later this afternoon (I'm also going to direct him to this forum).

Many thanks for the replies - yep, the DHT is a bit of a whiz in SIMS and regularly runs of reports to Excel for further analysis. I'm just aware that he'll endeavour to get a solution in place even though he's got a lot on his plate already: I was trying to get a feel for how much work is involved, mainly to see if the end justifies the effort; and I've got plenty of further reading to help with that. Thanks again.

Hi, folks. Thanks for reading - please be patient with the gallons of ignorance that drench this post: I've no knowledge of SIMS except that it uses a SQL server back end and we use it at our secondary school. I'm a governor and I'm working with the DHT on a project to get homework and detention data (initially) entered into SIMS and be able to report on it - ideally by individual email. From my limited understanding of the product, we'd need to have the "Learning Gateway" module installed, which we simply can't afford, hence this little project. Is it possible to record homework data for a class on the core product (I found detentions, not homework, on the website), and then extract it per student using a self-developed app or by stripping the data from a report? I gather that Capita are secretive about their data structure, so trying to find the data by looking in the tables is going to be difficult. Add to that their habit of moving things around, it's likely the report option is the only option - but if the fields aren't available I'll need to think of another method. Thanks again for any insight you might be able to offer.