panosthegreat

We use it for registration via iPad for PE and other roaming subjects that don't have access to a desktop version of SIMS. The first negative is it's not compatible with Android so we're stuck using iPads that cost more for the same hardware. Then we find staff regularly mark an entire class as absent instead of present - we think this is down to fat fingers as the absent and present buttons are quite small and close together... a larger iPad may solve this. If you don't mark a student as present/absent, they stay blank on the register.. whereas on regular SIMS it'll pick up that you didn't mark someone and ask if you want to mark them as absent or not. It also won't show you the history of a student's attendance that day, so if someone is in for say, Periods 1-3, then doesn't turn up to PE for Period 4, that teacher won't see they were marked in earlier in the day to flag them up as missing. It's better than using paper registers though.

Hello again John, thanks for the info, that makes sense. RootsSchImp > thanks for clarifying, we should be good then as our timings are the same, they just don't have a lesson at the end of some days where we do.

Our school has 2 sites (a primary and secondary as the main part of the school, and a smaller satellite primary school a few miles away) and 2 timetables (the main site and the satellite site have slightly different working hours) We're looking at moving over to Bromcom, from SIMS. Historically, we've had 2 SIMS licences (1 for each site) but I'm wondering if there's a way to timetable this better so we use just the 1 licence when we move to the cloud. We're registered under the same DFE number, so rather than have 2 separate Bromcom sites, we'd have 1 and just increase the number of students we pay for access The satellite site closes early 2 days a week, to allow their staff to come to the main site for meetings/training. I'm thinking I could make a class called 'Blank' and assign it to the teachers of the satellite school for the days they finish early. Their timings are slightly different but we could live with that. I think we'd have a small issue with setting cover, we'd have to manually work out which teachers were in which sites when assigning it.. but again we can live with that. Are there any problems anyone can foresee with this? or a better way to manage 2 timetables? I've been using NovaT6 with SIMS, but would timetabler or Bromcom's own version do this better?

Thanks, I think we must be doing something different to that, will have to do a bit of observation to see what the admission procedures we follow are. For now I've just changed the window of the admission group they are in to start in January, and as we approach that I'll push it forward a few more months.

If I create a report of all current students in SIMS, it pulls though our current students plus the students on our waiting list. They don't have a form class assigned to them, or an admission number, but they do have a starting date that seems to match the waiting list group they are in We patched this up by adding a filter on our reports so the admission number is not null - but they filter through to other areas of SIMS now. e.g. the Programme of Study picks them up (and getting staff to filter for a reg group is proving too complicated)... they also filter through when we sync to things like the parentseveningsystem site - it says we have more students than we have licences for - but if you take out those on the waiting list we're way below our licence allocation. The registrar says they've always set the windows of their waiting lists to the current term (e.g. now everyone on the waiting list has a start date of 1st September 2019). I changed it to a future date to solve this problem, but it created issues with their other reports (e.g. their reports on who the new students are - we are an international school so have a large turnover of students throughout the year) Is there a way to get SIMS not to count waiting list students as current students? maybe they have been accidentally promoted somehow... or do we need to look at the processes used by the registrar? maybe a setting from the applications module of SIMS.. Capita tell us to run Validate Memberships whenever we log this, then when that doesn't do anything we upload the database to them to be told a week later they are still working on it, and then nothing..

I think once a session is active it can't be changed, you'd have to make a new session and any comments already picked by teachers will be lost. Marks in a grade sheet should be fine though. If the report template has open/close tags around each subject correctly though, and in the session manager you tick 'ignore courses with no entries' in section 4 at the end then that should mean any dropped subjects won't appear in the final version. We've set our report template to pick marks from particular result sets in the grade sheets, so as long as the teachers don't put grades for students that dropped the course in they won't appear. And the same for comments from the comment bank (teachers can choose their own membership dates to avoid having old students still on their comment bank module), any subjects that don't pick comments won't appear in the final report

We have it as a lesson, and I manually go through the teacher bit in Nova and add 5 hours to the form tutors max hours so the tallies still work. Bit of an effort but it works

What about putting the documents on your school's VLE on a public page and sending out a link to that through the app?

We just have a report in SIMS as someone above described, you type in their legal surname and forename and it'll bring up all their teachers. I've set mine up to ignore class descriptions that are blank (that takes away the House leaders and Form Tutors but may not be needed for your schools). We just copy/paste the column of email addresses straight into Outlook after this runs. Takes less than a minute. Staff that need this regularly can pin it to their home pages too I've attached our report Teachers of a student search.zip here, unzip and import it into SIMS, not sure if that'll work for everyone depending on what you've input into SIMS I guess To create this manually: Data Area: set it to 'All Students' (I guess this could be current, but we sometimes use this to send out timetables for new/future students) Data Fields we use are: Student Name & Reg, then under 'Classes' we put Class Teacher, Class Description, Subject, Work Email (I've put a filter on Classes to only show where the Subject is not null, but this is just to take away the house leaders we have here, may not be relevant to your schools) Filter Students: Where Legal Surname equals (and leave value blank), then tick 'prompt at runtime', AND where legal forename equals (and leave value blank), then tick 'prompt at runtime' Specify Effective Date: I've set it to 'Supply Effective Date at Runtime' as we can then search future students to warn staff about new timetables, but I guess you can just leave that to 'today' Then for output, set it to Excel, and untick the 'Go Straight to Print Preview' box as that's annoying I have a similar one to pick out emails of teachers of a specific year group too if anyone needs? it's basically the same but with a filter for year group that runs at run time rather than legal forename/surname

I have the achievement report exporting into a spreadsheet, then a macro creates a number of pivot tables to get the totals vs different things (houses, year groups etc...), being careful to make sure the Values bit is set to Sum and not Count. It's a real hassle to edit the macro code so all this happens automatically when you run the report but it's working right now. If there are any requests to change that spreadsheet though I'm going to try and just teach the staff how to make a pivot table. I suspect SIMS Discover will do a better job of this and staff will find it easier to use, I just haven't practiced on it much yet

I really like it. We don't use it properly though as you're meant to set up next year's timetable first in Nova and get Options Online to transfer the blocks into Nova-T at the end, it seemed like too much effort to do that. Instead we used a form on our VLE for students to pick their options, then manually entered them into Options Online after teachers had cleared their choices as appropriate, hit the 'generate' button and it set up the blocks of GCSE and A Level subjects in less than a minute. We had 4 students out of 90-ish that only got 3 out of their 4 choices, and all of their backup choices fit. Next year I'll try the proper method where students enter their choices directly into the system, just didn't have time this year to read up all the documentation.

Thanks for the quick reply. I suspected there'd be too many rules to program in for 'wrong' alerts. We'll just have to do that manually Will try out the basic method, hopefully it improves accuracy. Teachers were getting confused with too many options

At the moment everyone in the school that can access SIMS class registers (classroom staff, leadership, admin, school nurse...) is given the same list of codes they can enter (/= present, A=Authorised Absence, L=Late etc...). I'd like to restrict teaching staff to just entering present, absent and late, and give the other groups access to the entire list of codes. This should prevent teachers authorising student absences. Could anyone point me in the right direction to do this? And secondly, slightly related, is it possible to have some kind of trigger warning to the class teacher if a grade looks wrong (e.g. if someone is in for Periods 1-3 and then absent Period 4)? or do we just have to rely on teachers noticing that themselves and sending out a missing student alert? Thanks

When I took out this bit of code it let me import the data into my SIMS: CHINESE Does that let you get any further?

I've got an XML file I made with dummy data to load into SIMS, it picks up they are a new applicant and lets me press 'create new applicant', but then in the final stage says "No admission group exists for the combination of Year of Entry,Season of Entry and Year Group and hence will not be imported" The admission group does exist as it's checks for that in the first step of importing... I'm just not sure how to make SIMS realise that.. If I make any progress I'll upload the XML code. Getting an online form to make the XML shouldn't be too much work after that.

My predecessor went for CHQ over Activities, we're very happy with it. They are very good at updating the interface when we request changes to make it easier for staff. My colleagues find it a very powerful tool as we run a huge amount of extra curricular activities through it.

Thanks Esteban I've had a go at your 2nd suggestion about running DBUpdate from command line which i can put into a batch file and schedule. Will test tonight. I was just a computer science teacher last year, feel like I'm hacking into the matrix at the moment haha

Background: We've got an issue with FMS and SIMS Finance clashing and locking our finance department out of SIMS. They get an error saying 'this file is in use by another user' and can't then do any work until I run a patch that Capita have sent me (11665 Unlock Patch). Restarting the server without applying the patch doesn't work as they remain locked out, and it can only be applied when nobody is on SIMS So, I was wondering whether I could create a .bat file to add to the task scheduler on our SIMS server so every night it runs at midnight to save me having to remote in and apply it? It's applied through the SIMS Database Upgrade Tool (dbUpdate) Anyone done anything similar? I've not had much luck searching online

I've been looking for some (ideally free) software that will let me send messages to the teacher computers in my school network that pop up on their screen We don't want a full messaging app like skype, I just want to send one-way messages to remind them when they forget to take registers. Actually, that's the only thing I really need it for. Is it worth unblocking the command prompt and using /msg or is there a better way to do this?

I've been looking into Bromcom to replace SIMS, they have a new Finance package they modeled on FMS that will be available in March. That may be worth looking at if you use FMS

I'm not 100% on this... but to link the user accounts try: Focus > System Manager > Manage Users Set the 'role' to any, and click search Once you've selected the user account in question by double clicking them, the 2nd part of their profile page says Login Details, and there's a magnifying glass next to the Username field - try searching there for their account to link them together

We usually get a first line response 4-5 weeks after posting a ticket, and then 2nd line (when their turn it off and on type advice doesn't work) takes another 3-4 weeks. I've tried calling through urgent problems but can't get anyone to help they just log the incident on my behalf and say someone will get in touch. At the recent conference they admitted this was a problem but said it would be resolved soon as they're outsourcing outsourcing support to a tech company in India, they're training them up now. I'm looking into third party support companies now

Does schoolcomms have the option to send a link to a file rather than attach it?

Just realised I misunderstood your initial reply, the flipped code works! Thanks Jamman. I never would have thought to try that Should be fairly straight forward now to get the XML tags to match the SIMS one now...

Update: I've found a workaround... I set the starting date for the waiting list group to be a date in the future, so that stops them pulling through into program of study tracking. The problem now is its messing up the 'new students report' we send out to teachers.. so i need to now keep changing the start dates so they are after the assessment windows and are moved to new future dates before the new pupil list is generated - forever Might be easier to just convince the school to go back to regular marksheet entry and abandon the PoS. could be the first step in me convincing them to abandon SIMS altogether to an MIS that has some support available