I've received several email requests describing what we are doing at Buckingham Primary School with SIMs, electronic registration and assessment data, so I thought I'd outline what we've done so far (Jan 2011), and what we are going to do next!
At BPS we decided that we wanted to implement electronic registration with a long term view of meeting the requirements of real time reporting to parents and a short time view of reducing the amount of time office staff spent each day re-entering data already collated by teachers.
We also wanted to improve the pupil assessment data recording and tracking system, again with a view to real time reporting, and streamlining our reporting to parents arrangements. We also wanted to have a system which allowed the SLT to centrally monitor data effectively, and to have a more consistent approach to tracking pupil progress. We didn't have to look too far for the implemented solution, as we had been using SIMs for years for recording attendance data; however, we had previously looked at, and discounted, Sims Assessment Manager for pupil progress tracking as it seemed a bit tricky! Despite our reservations, the LEA announced that they were looking for schools to trial Sims Learning Gateway (SLG) - web based SIMs - and this was enough to give us a nudge to give SIMs a proper go!<!--more-->
Despite SLG being web based, we were very keen to have each teacher in school have direct access to SIMs to enable speedy registration of children and access to the full range of Assessment Manager's features. We had a real battle to get our electronic registration set up, and we're not very popular with the local admin ICT support team to this day because of what we've set up! Basically, most primary schools have separate 'admin' and 'curriculum' networks that aren't linked; this means that the teacher laptops (which in most schools make use of the curriculum network) can't 'see' the SIMs server. We changed our network settings so that teacher laptops can access the admin network, and, therefore, access SIMs. The ICT support team had issue with this because of the security risks - potentially teachers or pupils using the teacher laptop could access/delete information stored on SIMs. We though it worth the risk, and many secondary schools are setup in a similar way to this anyway!
With SIMs now set up in the classroom, we now use SIMs for electronic registration. This has saved lots of office staff time. The only issues we've experienced are that some teachers turn their back on the class whilst taking registration due to the position of laptops; solution - move the laptop(?!). The other ongoing issue is what occurs when either SIMs isn't working (update needed) or there is a fire alarm and the teachers need the register on the playground. The solution we have for this one is to use laminated lists of pupils in addition to the electronic register; teachers simply indicate absent pupils here too, and take this outside in the event of a fire alarm.
Teachers now also use SIMS Assessment Manager for assessment data; this is with a view to realtime reporting requirements for primary schools by 2012. This year: teachers are using SIMs for the first time to write report comments; the 'individual pupil report' feature of SIMs will then be used to generate reports. Ultimately, these won't even be printed - parents will log into SLG to access the reports - but we are not quite there yet! Our office staff have been trained in running the reports, freeing teachers from the task of having to create and then print word documents for school reports. We are reporting to parents bi-annually this year too. Next year: the new class teacher will be able to easily access previous reports and assessment data via SIMs for his or her new class.
We now have SLG set up; this enables teachers to input assessment data via the web; the register can also be taken via the web too, but teachers tend to use this only as a backup. Potentially: teachers could use SLG full time for electronic registration and for assessment data, negating the need to link the admin and curriculum. Having SLG means that teachers can complete school reports or add/track assessment data from home. We have had to update our policies to ensure that teachers are very secure with their passwords and that security is a high priority; staff sign an updated internet agreement, promising to only use SLG from trusted locations and networks. The Assessment Manager element of SLG is minimalistic compared to the full Assessment Manager available from a full installation, and it doesn't contain features such as the useful tracking grids or charts, but it is still very impressive for a web-based implementation.
Our next step is to issue parental logins to access reports and attendance data. We are also considering using the SEN functionality of SIMs for our IEPs, and the behaviour module to track rewards. Parental access is a challenge that involves lots of 'cleansing' of data, ensuring that the correct login details are given to the correct parents!
Another next step is to integrate our school's Moodle VLE with SIMs. This will enable courses to be quickly set up in Moodle using data exported from SIMs of pupils and their classes. Our support team is on the case with this, and we are looking forward to trialling this soon!
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