jmel27

Hi All, I was wondering if anyone used the Options/Options Online part of SIMS? We are looking at possibly using it for our GCSE options for next year as we always used a paper version. Does anyone have any experience with it? Pro, cons? Thanks!

Thanks! I'll get the IT team to give it a go!

Morning All, I had an error on SIMS Exams Organiser: "Component 'mscomctl.ocx' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid" Capita sent our IT Team a patch, 17330, and I've been told by our team that it has been installed. I gave it a day or so (therefore restarted a few times in that time period) and the same error is coming up still. Has anyone else had a similar problem & been given a fix that works? Thanks, James

Ah right, I see. Thanks for the response, I'll see about doing that!

Hello All, I took over exams in September and it was briefly mentioned by another exams officer that she did Mock Exams in Exam Organiser as this meant she could generate a seating plan for each exam. Does anyone know how this would be accomplished? I can't seem to get anywhere as I have created a new season but as there is no basedata for it, I can't create seating plans or create a custom timetable. Many thanks, James

Hi Roots, Thanks for the info. I thought it could well be something along those lines. This may well make sense for our mock grades, but setting it up for each individual subject and Year Group (7 Year Groups multiplied by on average 15 subjects = 105 different marksheets to do this for, plus 4 reporting periods per year) doesn't look to be plausible I don't think. Really appreciate the feedback, now I can go back to our Senior Management and tell them it's not really viable. Just the standard If Then Else might be but even so, still a lot of work for something that really isn't hugely necessary. Thanks very much, James

Hi All, Towards the end of the 17/18 academic year we started implementing colour coding onto grade sheets (mainly mock grade sheets) to show at a glance how well the students were doing. We have a separate aspect in SIMS that reflects their target grades for each subject and all I did was use the "Nested If Then Else" to compare the exam result to the target grade. What our headteacher wants now is for 5 colours to be put onto all of our Effort & Attainment grades, rather than 3 seeing as the nested if then else can only do greater than, equal to or more than and it caused issues when kids had target grades of 9, therefore couldn't get a "green" sheet as they couldn't actually get higher. What he wants is the colours to reflect how far above or below target they are, as exampled below: 2+ Grades below - Red 1 Grade below - Light Red/Orange On Target - Light Green 1 Grade above - Green 2+ Grades above - Blue Does anyone know if this is possible? Will it require tons of formulae on every marksheet this is present on? Thanks very much!

Ah that sounds like a pretty reasonable solution. Thanks for that!

Hi All, It's time to import CTFs again and we are having the same problem we have had every year. Primary schools tend to do things differently depending on the school and put some names in capital letters, forget the parental salutation, spell names wrong etc. and when this happens, it either creates a whole extra set of data (i.e. 4 parental contacts, where mum and dad have been put on twice, once as Mr & Mrs Smith and once as just Smith) or it overwrites what our admissions officer has spent a long time inputting. Is there a way to check over what it is coming into SIMS and stop it from duplicating everything simply because of capital letters or a lack of a salutation? Does anyone else have this problem? Many thanks.

That is exactly what I was looking for! I didn't particularly want to spend hours trolling through SIMS menus, that's exactly thank you very much!

The Head of 6th Form wants a report on how many students throughout the course of the year dropped subjects because we apparently didn't keep another record elsewhere!

Hi All, I'm having a slight problem. Does anyone know of a way to find any leavers from specific courses (i.e. kids who dropped courses mid-year). I'm hoping there's a report you can run to get this information, but I'm struggling to find it. Any help would be great. Thanks. James

I find that to be the case with a lot of SIMs though. I think for us, since our technology is pretty ancient our servers take their time updating things. Might have to wait until tomorrow to see. I've created a guide on how to install it seeing as our parents are pretty useless with tech as well, so I'm expecting loads of issues from them. Although if it's similar to yours with them going and not going out, I could be in trouble!

As a side point, is there any way to push the reports through any quicker to SIMS Online? Or do I just have to wait until it decides it wants to do it? We enabled access to it on Friday morning and the website says it can take up to 12 hours for things to get going. I had our staff member check this morning and still nothing on the attendance side. Obviously reports won't be available till they are uploaded onto the SIMS Online server.

Hi, I managed to stumble across the answer while frantically googling (as usual). Capita kindly forgot to inform us that you have to publish the reports under Routines > SLG & Sims Online > Publish Documents. Still not sure about the attendance though. But in response to your question, no she only has the one profile by the looks of it

Morning All, We recently set up SIMs Parent App and luckily have a member of staff who is also a parent to trial it. She can see the school diary and her childs' timetable, but there is nothing under attendance or reports. I have both of these options enabled in the admin section but nothing is pulling through. I assume reports is coming from either student profiles or individual reports. Can anyone suggest what I might be missing? Thanks.

We found a temporary fix for this specific problem I think. The parent needs to add the email address the InTouch messages are coming from to their trusted senders or contacts list. The email address seems to be (your dfe number)@Capita-Intouch.co.uk i.e. [email protected] We are still having problems with the system sending duplicates of one student's reports to parents with multiple students at the school, but thats another problem

Hi All, We switched over to Student Profiles to produce our end of year reports instead of having an Individual Report, however I can't link the student profile to individual students. We now need a report for a couple of individuals from previous years, but as it is not in the linked documents we are unable to find it. Is there any way of finding student profiles produced in previous years or is it simply gone after the academic year is up? Thanks.

Hi, thanks for the message. I sent through the grade sheets for the parents' children via Outlook and that seemed to get there no problem. I suggested putting the school on the approved senders' list but seeing as she has never received an email, she can't approve it. When I look on the email it sent, I can only see the name of the SIMs user who sent the email, so would you know the format of the email address it sends from so that the parent can add the InTouch contact? i.e. is it something along the lines of [email protected]? - - - Updated - - - Most email providers seem to be OK, but the ones having problem are Yahoo & GMail, which other parents have and seem to be getting through fine. A mystery for sure.

Hi All, I have had a couple of messages recently from parents who have not received any email communications from the school when we use Intouch. It doesn't seem to matter whether it's a general Intouch message, Individual Report or Attainment/Merit Mark, nothing is being received. I have suggested checking their junk folders but nothing appears there either, and I'm not getting a bounceback on SIMs to say the email cannot be delivered. I've also confirmed with the parents that their email addresses are correct. The only reason the parents knew was because their kids told them they should be receiving grades which never arrived. Has anyone had any problems with this? Are the email providers filtering the Intouch messages before they even get there? Thanks.

That was where I was going wrong, I was making a Data Review using formula! Thanks very much for your help, much appreciated!

That's what I thought it would be, but I tried it and it just showed up the Mock Result, no colour. I've calculated in the marksheet but even when I hit save, it doesn't keep the colours I have to recalculate every time I open it. Is there some tickbox I'm missing somewhere?

Hi All, I'm looking to essentially create a Conditional Formatted "Individual Report". I know in the marksheets, you can create Nested If Then Else formulas which show up cells as different colours (i.e Green for above target, Yellow for on target & Red for below target). One of my colleagues is adamant that you can bring through these formulas onto an individual report. Essentially what the school wants to produce is a simulated results day for Year 11 Mock Exams, whereby each student receives their mock results printed out, with each result highlighted in colour comparing it to their target, green, yellow or red as stated above. Does anyone know if this is possible? I assumed because the individual reports are generated in MS Word, that conditional formatting was impossible and that this cannot be done but my colleague seems to think that by somehow creating the formulas on the worksheet, they will pull through to an individual report. I have tried but it doesn't seem to. Thanks for any help!

We report both, but lesson attendance is one of the main things we put on their reports seeing as the students seem to be quite good at turning up for registration and then not going to lessons. They ignore the blank register but it stays as a missing mark. At present it's not listed as anything, you can't put a mark in for their 'free' periods seeing as there is nothing on their timetables currently.

That would be the most sensible option, but leaving the registers blank obviously affects their overall attendance and seeing as we put their attendance on reports and such, we'd get an uprising from the parents! Thanks for the suggestion.