Starbug1

Ah yes having spoken to our supplier, I now understand that is exactly what happened to us. We managed to get a 3 year pricing deal just before the price rise 3 years ago.

Has anyone got any ideas if the price for this has gone up a lot lately? Our quote per year for the next 3 years has gone up by a four figure sum Thanks.

Regarding providing access to parents/carers, another school has said they use Wizkids ( https://www.wizkids.co.uk/school/edulife/ ) which integrates SIMS with Google and Active Directory; I assume if we went with that, it would be instead of using Wonde? I understand that it gets the parent data from SIMS and allows parents to see what work has been set on Google Classroom. Does anyone have any experience of Wizkids? Does Salamandersoft have an option to give access to parents? Wonde works reasonably well for us, so we'd only want to switch if we can move to a provider that genuinely provides more functions as well as being reliable and affordable. Any experiences anyone has with any of these tools would be useful.

Thanks for all the replies so far. Does anyone know of any method of extracting data that shows coursework assigned to students, for example to easily be able to see which teachers are not setting work, or what work each student has been set?

Can anyone recommend any good software to help us manage our Google Classroom? We currently use Wonde to sync with our MIS, which is SIMS, however this isn't really proving to be sufficient for our requirements. For example, our House Leaders would like to be able to easily see what work has been set for any given student, so to do this they would need to be added to all Classrooms. But I am not aware of any easy method of ensuring that the relevant staff are always added to all relevant classrooms. Yes we could ask teachers to add them manually, and yes we could alternatively use GAM but neither of these are easy long term solutions. Also we may have other requirements, for example we may want a method of providing some level of access to parents, but without creating a burden for teachers to add the relevant information. If anyone can point us in the direction of any recommended software, and any indication of potential costs, this would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance

We had an interesting case related to the supervisor role; a member of staff who used to teach Science told us that she has loads of Science groups appearing in Classroom which are not on her timetable. Unlike in your case where staff want to be added to various classes, we had the opposite problem: a member of staff with loads of classes she didn't want! We looked into this and discovered she was added as a course supervisor of Science, but with an end date which had elapsed. So we are wondering if that was it. However this role has since been deleted, but the classes keep coming back (if the classes are removed, they just re-appear) Wonde say that the data is coming from SIMS somewhere, so there must be somewhere in SIMS where this teacher has been added to a role that is causing her to be added to loads of classes, but she doesn't want that. Does anyone have any ideas what it could be?

There is, using Wonde to synchronise with SIMS, but the Admin manager says this teacher isn't assigned to the classes in question.

A teacher has asked me the following question. I don't use Google Classroom myself. Does anyone here use Google Classrooms and have any advice for them? Many thanks

I've just tried that, no spaces, no quotes, everything on the C drive, and same error Thanks for the idea though

I am running the SIMS photo exporter by Salamandersoft ( https://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/free-utilities/sims-photo-exporter/ ) It works well, except I've been asked to put the photos into folders by yeargroups and I can't get that part to work. I am running the following command: PhotoExport.exe SIMSUSERNAME SIMSPASSWORD "O:\FOLDERNAME\Y11" /year:11 /nameAsId But I get an error: I get the same error for any yeargroup I try. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance

One of our students has an issue in the Android app when clicking on a class; the error says "Sorry, something went wrong. Try again" and the class disappears and says "Class not found" He says he had the same issue using Chrome on his phone yesterday, however when he tried it today, it worked fine. So I've suggested he uses Chrome for now. It's very difficult to help students with issues like this at the moment, as the opportunities to actually help them are extremely limited (short break times, short lunch times, no after school club they can go to, etc), and the lack of proper error code makes it very difficult to diagnose the issue.

Yes I think so. I don't think we have a 'Data Manager' as such but data would be the responsibility of the Admin Manager (and ultimately the Business Manager) but the Admin Manager is really busy with lots of other stuff e.g. personnel issues and more. I am not sure if we get much support from the local authority in this area (if we do, I don't know about it! I could try to find out though!) though we are an Academy Trust school, if that makes a difference. In the past I've really just run patches as they've been requested from us and it's not really been a problem, we always do it the same day; I'm a bit unsure on how to respond to this request to be more proactive.

We (IT support) have to do patches of course (we use SOLUS3 for that); we are happy to do them and I always do them late at night (working remotely of course) when hardly anyone is using the system, the issue here is that we are basically being asked to proactively look for patches, whereas in the past we would install patches on request (and always the same evening; we wouldn't keep them waiting!) Filesets won't deploy for me using SOLUS3 for some reason; they always give errors, but admin staff have always been happy to update the filesets in the past as that's something they can do and they know how to do it and when they're needed. That's never been an issue before but someone is basically now asking us to check for when new versions are made and for us to update them so that they don't have to. As for who is 'in charge' of the data, that isn't not really an issue as such, as we have a good structure in place in terms of who is 'in charge' (Admin Manager and ultimately Business Manager); the issues more surround the day to day aspects, as I get the impression each element is delegated to people with no-one really keeping an overview of developments in SIMS and data generally. The people who are in charge are really busy with lots of other things, whereas I get the impression some schools have someone who is dedicated to keeping an eye on data and to systems such as SIMS, and that the Census may be done by them? Whereas here the Census may be done by a different person each year as the person who does the Census is a relatively junior admin position with a high turnover of staff, if you see what I mean.

Thanks for the replies Problem is we have a high turnover of staff in that role. So the new person doesn't know the procedures. The request didn't come from that person, but someone who is training them. I get the impression many other schools have a dedicated SIMS Data manager who has a good overview of what developments are going on with SIMS, what patches may be required, and that sort of thing. We don't really have that here. It's always interesting to hear how other schools do things; there often isn't necessarily a 'right' or 'wrong' way but there can be better ways and it's useful to know what goes on in other schools and how reasonable expectations of the IT support departments are. Yes we do. I filtered the list of available patches for 'census' and installed the two that I found. However I think we're being asked to proactively do that on a regular basis in advance of the census, rather than when they ask us to do it. The other issue is the filesets; they can download them and install them into SIMS, and indeed they have done this on previous occasions, including this time, but I think the request is for us to do it in future because they're very busy. SIMS is a bit of a grey area here; some aspects that are bit complex for admin staff can be perceived as 'an IT support issue' rather than part of an admin role, on occasions.

Each year we have issues with staff wanting to run the Census and the staff doing the Census are not always sure what is required in terms of filesets and other prerequisites so have sent this request to us (IT support): How would you handle that? Thanks

GrouCall have mixed up our login with another school We have 3 email addresses registered with GroupCall; when we type any of these addresses, they auto-complete to a school in Birmingham. GroupCall have not replied to us.

Here's what we did: Add/Remove programs > Remove Notebook 19 (not removing anything else) Run Notebook 11.4 2013 web installer, tick Notebook 11 only Copied snapshot.exe to a server; using Group Policy to copy the file to "C:\Program Files (x86)\SMART Technologies\SMART Product Drivers\snapshot.exe" (as instructed at: otherwise the camera tool icon won't work) So far this is working perfectly. In fact it's better than that: some staff had reported PDFs taking longer to load, on investigation this was only occurring on PCs with Notebook 19 installed. Now those PCs are running Notebook 11 PDFs load instantly. Smart won't admit that Notebook 11.4 is compatible with Windows 10. While I accept they do not support it, they will try to convince people not to use it. In reality, it can be used and it does work!

We installed Notebook 19, after Smart told our IT Subject Leader that this was the best version to use with our setup (Windows 10 and Office 2016); the link we were given was to the full version and the warning message said we could continue to use the basic version for free. We do not use the premium features so the basic version would be fine for us, so we weren't too worried to see that the premium freatures would expire after 45 days. However what happened was much worse than we expected: users are now told they have to log in, or the program won't load. However it does not allow us to actually log in, it goes through a series of prompts and gives various error messages. Is there an actual download for the basic version that does not come with any of the bloated "premium" features? I clicked the above link but couldn't find a download link. Alternatively, can we still use the old Notebook 11.4 software with Windows 10 and Office 2016? Also, are files saved with version 19 of Notebook backwards compatible with 11.4? If anyone can answer any of these questions, we would really appreciate it!