wing045

Coming back from easter tomorrow and noticed late this evening that our timetable is showing monday's timetable tomorrow. I know I need to apply timetable again to fix it but getting a warning about how it may delete lesson marks. How do I ensure I am not losing data from earlier in the year? If I change the dates to only apply from tomorrow would that do it? Or would that wipe out all applied timetable days and only reapply them from tomorrow? I can't find where in the manuals this is covered.

I'm looking for recommendations about management of work experience placements. Either a process for how SIMS might be used to handle this natively or with the additional of an additional module or third party tool that links with SIMS. We have an extensive work experience program that involves all students from year 10 through to year 13. We assist students with finding placements. We have ongoing relationships with companies that provide placements. At the moment we have a Google Form which students use to submit preferences for which field(s) they're interested in working with and we then match students to potential placements in specific companies and then we have a staff member who manually tries to match students to placements. I'm looking for a tool that will help with this by either automating the processing of matching students to placements or at least making the manual process of doing this easier than copy/pasting students names across various different sheets in a spreadsheet to try and find an optimal solution. My initial idea was to use SIMS Options we already use for subject options choices as it seems that would do a lot of what we need, but after some experimentation I'm sure we can make it work. Has anybody else had experience of doing this either using SIMS or third party tools?

So I have just learned to my surprise that SLG is being discontinued from Jan. Given that we're on SIMS Hosted with only 30 licenses for the desktop application the majority of our staff rely on SLG. The only alternative is the Teacher App, which we do already have and are using but it's simply not a replacement for SLG. Teachers can't use it to view, edit, or report on behaviour data. The registers don't show attendance from earlier in the day on the register. The medical information shown is very limited. I could go on. Moving away from Hosted isn't an option for us as we're a Mac school and if we self-hosted SIMS we'd need Windows. Buying more licenses for the desktop app would double the annual cost and frankly I resent being forced into doubling our outlay for what would essentially be the exact same service we already had. Is anybody else in this position? Or have any thoughts on how to approach this one?

Thanks @vikpaw that's really interesting. Whereabouts are you in Saudi? Last year I was working in Jeddah. We used SIMS there and I have quite a bit of experience with it so I'm tempted to go that route simply because it will make the transition easier with such a short time span, but despite the time scale I don't want that to be the ONLY reason we choose SIMS when it has such far reaching consequences.

It's CLASSiS from an Irish company called Learning Data. We're an independent British Overseas School in Romania. An all-through school with early years through to sixth form. Around 600 students on one site. Some boarding provision.

So, long story short, we've been using a hosted MIS solution. We got an email today telling us that they're discontinuing the service after this academic year. Now we're left with 4 months to find a new one, install it and train everybody to use it before the end of the new school year. So we're now in the market for a new MIS and fast! I've some experience myself with various different systems and have one in mind but want to spend at least *some* time exploring alternatives with the limited time I have available! So if anybody has any recommendations for an MIS which is a mature product, has good support, a track record and is unlikely to disappear after a year or two - please can you share your experiences? Thanks!

Thanks for the response and the feedback.

I am a Head of IT in a school with 10 years experience in teaching. Like many teachers I'm looking for a career change which will take me away from the classroom. However I don't want to leave education all together. My role includes a foot in teaching and a foot in developing whole school digital strategy. I have more technical experience than a lot of IT teachers I've encountered. I'm considering a career change to becoming a network manager. I have some technical skills (although I would need to do an MCSE which I'm looking in to) and have experience in leading a team and in strategic planning/development and I have done a lot of staff training over the years. So, my question is: 1 - Has anybody else made a similar move? 2 - Does it sound like, assuming I complete an MCSE, like I would have the right sort of experience to move directly in to a network manager role in a school? Any other advice or feedback is very welcome.