duncan hield – product manager parental engagement
TRANSCRIPT
Duncan Hield – Product Manager
Parental Engagement
““SIMS Learning Gateway
SLG provides secure access to children’s progress for parents and strengthens the triangle of communication between school, parent and pupil.
Neil McClementsRainey Endowed School
SLG Headlines
• Deliver Customer Change Requests
• Continue to enhance Homework
• Develop ease of reporting
Spring 2015 – Homework Statuses
• "show late homework" will be changed to "show homework status“
• web part property to globally hide all statuses
Spring 2015 – Teacher Homework View
• Homepage Widget for teachers to view their own homework
Spring 2015 – Teacher Homework View
• The homework appears in the Timeline according to the due date
• Blue backgrounds indicate future homework
• Red backgrounds indicate homework has not been handed in by at least one student and if homework is due for that day
Spring 2015 – Teacher Homework View
• Green backgrounds indicate all homework has been handed in
• Yellow backgrounds indicate at least one student has been given a homework extension
Spring 2015 – Pre-defined Reports
• All fields available in reporting dictionary
• Homework• Teacher• Hierarchy
• SLG Alert Widget• How many parents have completed DCS• How many parents have read published reports• Report for which parents have not
SLG Focus and Priorities
• Publish reports improvements
• Browser investigation and fixes
• Authentication
““SIMS InTouch
SIMS InTouch saves us time and makes communication instant, helping with behaviour and attendance issues
Janet EpplestonNorth Chadderton
InTouch
• During the recent snow period
• Total Messages sent via InTouch
• Average SMS sent using InTouch 2014
• Primary• Secondary
4,000
12,000
2.4 million
Primary Pricing...Thank you for your feedback
• Your feedback - ‘The Primary price is prohibitive’
• The Primary License price is now £400 from 1st April
• Your feedback - ‘the initial number of SMS is prohibitive’
• Offer before 1st July, 4000 SMS
What have we done in the product?
• Move to web services:• InTouch is even easier to support• Low touch install
• 680 schools have already moved to web services• 200 left to move
Spam Filtering
• Further protects InTouch Schools by providing:
• Spam filtering• Anti-Virus• Banned word scanning• Identify potential threats through attachment
scanning
How Have Schools upgraded?
• InTouch web services and VPN run in parallel
• If SSM not installed, InTouch continues to run with VPN on Autumn
• School upgrades to Autumn
• SSM is installed & InTouch services started
• School receives email, copy and pastes the licence key into set up screen
InTouch Spring - Usability
• No need to set up the Scheduler Service
• Automatic Scheduling of Messages and Reminders
• Improvements to spam filtering
• Further increase speed of InTouch
• Flag messages – Outlookifying InTouch
My Messages Inbox (Flag Status)
My Messages Inbox (Flag Status) In sort order
School Messages Inbox (Flag Status)
InTouch Summer - Customisation
• One mailbox for all messages• Allow schools to customise message defaults to suit their needs:
•Outgoing messages
•Incoming messages
•Recipient
•External Email Accounts
One MailboxInTouch users will now see one mailbox for all messages, with School and User (formerly MyMessages) having icons to identify them
For each message type, default can be changed of who messages are sent from; the school or the user.
Customise Send/Receive as
CustomiseDefaults can be set by the school
e.g. a part time attendance officer could send messages, with the replies received by anyone with School permissions to ensure timely resolution
Customise RecipientsThe default can be changed for the InTouch recipient type
External Email Accounts
Choose message types to be forwarded to an external account.
InTouch Summer - Customisation
““SIMS Agora
Using SIMS Agora has been very easy for our school – it just works! Our parents like the system too and really appreciate the convenience of being able to make payments online, whenever and wherever they wish to.
Mrs Jean Robinson Didsbury CofE Primary School
Agora
• Over 24,000 active parent accounts
• Over £5 million processed since launch (April 2013)
• 145,000 transactions
• January - £600,000 transaction value
Agora Headlines
• Support Unit notifications – end February
• Cashless Catering ready for early adopters
• FMS integration launched at BETT
• Refunds
Support Unit Notifications
• Making Agora easier to support, building on LA demo sites
• Nominate support email contact for notifications
• Part of making Agora the One Stop Shop for parents to make all payments for their children
Cashless Catering
• Only Accredited SIMS Partners
• Ability to roll back data if required
Additional Synchronisation Statuses
The green tick denotes a successful synchronisation
The orange exclamation mark means no synchronisation in the last 24 hours
The red cross means synchronisation failed
The cycle means it has an unknown synchronisation status
The Agora Dashboard screen shows the synchronisation status of the SIMS upload, the FMS download and the School Meals upload and downloads.
Agora interface with FMS
Agora interface with FMS
Agora FMS interface journals
Parent make a £10.00 payment on line
Deposit of funds into schools bank account where a transactions charge is made/taken – this will be a few days later
Ledger Code Ledger Type DR CR
School Dinner Money IN 10.00
External Debtor DE 10.00
Ledger Code Ledger Type DR CR
External Debtor DE 10.00
Bank Account BK 9.70
Transaction Charge EX 0.30
December 2014 Release
• Universal Free School Meals
• Diagnostics and Reporting
• Student Statement of all Transactions
• Documentation for SIMS Support Units
• Record Refunds
Produce a statement for a single student
Choose groups to filter students
Student Statement
Filterable list of each payment, exportable to MS Excel
Show a refund has been made
Manual Transactions screen
Select from dropdown
Select product to refund
Specify Refund
Refunds can be for less than the full product amount but cannot exceed it
Finalise Refund
A reason must be logged for the refund
Print a refund receipt
Previous refunds
Refund Reports
Agora Product Page Re-Design
• Functionality Enhancements• User Experience • Paying in instalments• £0 balance products• Upload PDFs• Parental consent• Improve stock control
• Screens so far.......
Agora Future Priorities
• Improvements to on-boarding process
• Functionality Enhancements• Reporting• Paypoint• Transaction surcharges• Store card facility• Staff Provision
