Parent Portal AUP

We did not feel we could launch the parent portal, without putting a specific AUP in place. Below is the AUP (Revision 1), I am sure that this will need to be tweaked and re-issued over the next few weeks, but it is a starting point. Feel free to lift it for your own use, I am all for sharing!

All Parents/Guardians are required to sign up to this acceptable use policy before they log in to the parent portal for the first time. They must accept the conditions set out below in order to access any material. This policy remains in effect for all subsequent login's. If the policy changes the policy will be reissued and re-acceptance sort. If you breach any of these conditions, the college reverses the right to deny access to the Parent Portal.
Account Security
· Each individual is responsible for the security and use of their Username and password.
· You are not allowed to use the account, Username or password of any other user.
· You must not disclose your Username or password to anyone else.
Communication

When using the communication facilities (forums) YOU MUST:
· Respect other people's views and beliefs.
· Only post comments which are appropriate to the particular discussion.
· Remember that you are conversing with real people.
· By contributing posts to any forum within the parent portal you are granting a license to the school to reproduce the content of your posting, and you are also granting a license to other users to download or copy the content in accordance with these conditions.
· You must give due acknowledgement for material quoted from other sources.
When using the communication facilities YOU MUST NOT:
· Post anything abusive, defamatory, obscene or otherwise illegal.
· Post any personal or private information on any individual.
· Use forums to air grievances, grievances should be made in accordance with college procedures.
· Copy or forward any communication without permission.
· Include material which is confidential or the copyright of which is owned by someone else, unless you have first obtained permission.
· Post material which contains viruses or other programs which may disrupt the school's systems.
· Post any advertising or promotional material.
· Behave in an impolite or offensive manner.
Copyright
You are permitted to view, copy, and print documents hosted within the parent portal subject to your agreement that:
· Your use of the material is for your own personal information, and for non-commercial purposes only.
· You will not modify the documents or graphics in any form or manner.
· You will not copy or distribute graphics separately from their accompanying text and you will not quote materials out of their context.
Please read this document carefully. If you violate these provisions, access to the parent portal will be denied. Additional action may be taken by the school in line with existing policy. Where appropriate, police may be involved or other legal action taken.

I have read and understand the above and agree to use the school computer facilities within these guidelines.

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Parent Portal launches to Year 7 parents

I know it has been a while since my last post, and for that I apologise. It has been a truly manic few weeks back focusing on getting technology, protocols, pedagogy and practice right for our launch of the parent portal. I'm going to endeavour to put together some of the key elements we have worked through in recent weeks to see a really successful launch event as we have this evening. I'll make my apologies in advance for any incoherence in the post - final preparations for launch have taken their toll a bit on me this week and I'm somewhat deprived of sleep!

STRUCTURE OF THE PORTAL

I will endeavour to put a video walk through up of our initial parent portal some time during the next two weeks but as a quick summary I will list how we have structured our phase 1 portal. I say phase 1 as I am sure that the portal will develop in the next few weeks, especially when parents start to engage through the discussion forums and start to throw ideas back at us.

My Child Area - Access to MIS data (Currently Attendance, SIMS lesson monitor, SIMS behaviour log). We have stats pages for attendance and behaviour. Attendance statistics can be analysed by day, period and subject. Every parent has a child overview page that summarises key data and allows them to select each child. on this overview page is the current days timetable, attendance summary, list of teachers and news feed.

The news feed is really interesting as it very much takes the feed you might have on Facebook, but is focused on educational content not people. It summarises legal registration sessions, lesson monitor but also when assignments are issued to the child. All a parent has to do to access the assignment is click on the item in the feed. The assignment will open in a new window and by the way that FROG lessons are structured signposted all the resources that are needed for the student. This will help parents support their children in a much more focused way.

We then have a series of information pages - nested pages for our twitter feed, Youtube channel, school day, canteen menu, homework, bus timetables, extra curricular clubs, PTA and governor information, technology to support learning. Parents also have access to online letters (all main letters - year group/trips/whole school are placed on here in pdf format), college calendar, newsletter, discussion forums, parent surveys, college documents (policies etc...), reporting of student absence.

For launch we have not gone mad with discussion forums at all - there is one forum, entitled parent portal, which is for them to chat about the portal, what they think of it, and give the college some honest feedback. We had the first post within 40 minutes of the launch event finishing. Already we are getting excited about directions the portal will take. I think the general concensus of our parents is how can we support our child and help them with their studies, not just accessing data about them so I can see subject specific support forums being developed, along with specific parental support areas for English and Maths in the short term, other subjects to follow.

For those of you who have been following my blog and/or have heard me speak about parental engagement you will know we're passionate about true engagement at Costello, not just presenting data, information at best, to parents, but getting parents more involved in the processes associated with education and learning. This will become evident when you see how our parent portal structure is beginning to evolve.

When you log on to our portal you are greeted with an initial screen that takes parents to the AUP - this is an online copy of the paper AUP they have signed and only appears the first time they log on. FROG keeps an audit of when each parent accepted the T&C (form database) for reference. This method of putting the AUP is excellent, if/when the AUP is updated we can just reissue the page to all parents - simple!

LOGISTICS OF ISSUING USERNAMES/PASSWORDS

This can be a logistical nightmare, so I'll discuss what we have done - having now gone through the process with 1 year group it actually works quite well. We all know that there is a big emphasis on safeguarding, and with current government department legislation on how usernames/passwords can be disseminated (i.e. not using postal systems) it was clear that sending username/passwords out through the post would not cut it at all. So, here is a breakdown of the processes followed.

• Parent accounts set up in FROG - you cannot exported all parental details, including username and password as a csv file for security reasons. We downloaded every parental user, including FROGid, full address, firstname, surname, username, child name(s) as a csv and used some vb to create random (strong) passwords into the csv file. This was then uploaded back to FROG to populate the system with the new generic, yet strong passwords.
• The CSV file created was then used to create the mail merge letters (making sure that we had sorted by parent surname / firstname so that all letters would print in order). Letter had parental address on it.
• Letters printed and split, put in windowed envelope into 5 alphabetical sections to split the work
• Written copy of the Parent Portal AUP inserted into envelopes - these to be signed and returned to school
• Run a launch event for the parent portal for each year group. At beginning of evening 5 staff man the boxes of letters. Parents filter to correct queue with proof of identity and address. This information cross matched against the details on the envelope. Once satisfied of identity staff then give parent letter.
• Most parents opened letters whilst there and duly signed the AUP - we had a drop box out for parents to leave them with us at end of evening.

The fact that we did this has been very well received by parents, they are appreciative of the sensitive nature of the information that can be accessed through these accounts and were fully supportive of the processes we adopted. There were a few positive comments that clearly indicated that parents were impressed with the care we have gone to.

We still have a large percentage of letters to be collected so I will be mass texting all of Y7 parents tomorrow, encouraging them to come in with proof of id/address to collect them. Failing this we can do another hit at our Y7 tutors evening that is in a few weeks time.

Running a launch event for the portal has worked really well, it gives the school the opportunity to do a live demo and really secure their vision in the minds of the parents and help set expectations on how it is to be used. Although not made explicit in what we presented, there is an underlying expectation that parents will use the portal. The evening that was run for Y7 parents was not all about the parent portal it was the first time new Y7 parents have been invited in to the college and they also had a settling in talk-supporting their child as well as the option to attend 5 different workshops that were being hosted.

So, you can look forward to a number of up and coming blog posts about how things are going!

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Parental Engagement - FROG Conference 2009

Many of you will know that this year I presented a session on parental engagement and use of online portals at the FROG National learning platform conference, June 2009. I have been through my presentation again and recorded a screencast (below) for those that missed it.

I hope to be blogging quite a bit more about the development of our parent portal over the next few weeks, the summer term is always a good term for extended work on projects and we will be in a position to roll out our parent portal to all our parents ready for the start of the new academic year in September. Enjoy the video - you might want to get a tea/coffee, it's about 40 mins :)

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Engaging content for our transition Portal

Following on from my previous post about the xtranormal text to movie service I thought I would put something together for our transition portal which is currently in development. My thinking behind this is to really try and get some engaging content that will capture the minds of our Y6 students and keep them interested and engaged in the portal and what it had to offer. The whole video took about 20 minutes to put together. This is my first attempt at using the service, results not bad for a first attempt which i think shows how easy it is to use. It is going to be really easy to embed into FROG with some good. Think it is kind of cool. How awesome would it be if this service was a FROG3.0 widget!

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PODCASTS

GCSE Media Studies initial run of five podcasts went live today - total set up time by teacher - 5 mins. Students already subscribing to feed through iTunes/podcast catcher and the like. Great result and 110% from the Media Studies department - "Distributing engaging digital content to students could not be easier."

Part of the college's vision for E-LEarning this year is to really push engaging revision content and support materials for Y11 to access - we've perceived this to be a relatively easy short term win that will have a really positive impact on our student population. Am going to put a post up later in the week about how we have tackled the issued of securing an understanding and ownership of the college vision for E-Learning through our E-Strategy.

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BETT 2009

Apologies for the lack of a post last week, it was a busy one. But busy in the sense that it was good and really productive. As we all know it's that traditional time of year where people ramble down to Olympia to visit BETT to see what how the latest technology is innovating education - still probably one of the best shows of it's kind in the world. This was my 15th year attending to BETT and there's something every year that gets me excited. This year was no exception - what I found exciting was that more teachers are becoming more savvy about the potential of E-Learning. This is a really interesting change in dynamic that I think will have quite an impact on the market over the next few years. Day to day classroom teachers are becoming educated consumers who show a much better understanding of the pedagogical value of E-Learning. Undoubtedly for me the highlight of the show was FROG - FROG 3.o was showcased and it's looking absolutely awesome. In my mind it is one of the few learning platforms that has grasped a good understanding of the educational marketplace and what schools want. They're streets ahead of the competition in terms of pure functionality and flexibility. Of course, many will question my bias as an existing FROG customer but those that do should really get a demonstration of it for themselves. For me what stands out as a large jump forward is the level of MIS integration and how that will support home/school partnerships and give access to a wealth of MIS stored data, this coupled alongside the social networking elements that can be set up to be used to deliver specialised learning communities for example -really cool! The system uses graphical widgets to start laying down content - I think this is going to be really innovative as, just like with iPhone apps, people will be able to develop third party widgets for the system - so the sky's the limit. This will see an unprecedented amount of support for the platform by third parties and create a system where more seamless integration becomes a possibility rather than a mere pipedream.

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Press Coverage

Photographers from both the Basingstoke Gazette and Hampshire Police were in school today covering the college's use of FROG to develop positive relationships between our students and Hampshire Police. Our PCSO (Alex Wheatland), two of our Y7 sudents who have used the discussion forum to ask Alex questions along with myself were involved in the photo shoot. Should be in local press within next few weeks.

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Secure Gateway at Costello

Secure Gateway is finally aup and running. What is it? Simple - it is a service that gives all of our staff and students access to using school computers from home. Once authenticated through the learning platform students/staff can select a computer to use from a pool of remote machines. The benefits of this service are tremendous. Firstly, it gives staff access to SIM's remotely, secondly students can use a school computer and have access to the full suite of software, not just what they have installed on their machine at home.

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Hampshire Police and FROG

Have been asked for a press release by Hampshire Police on FROG and how we are developing it's use with our local Safer Neighbourhoods Team. Looks like this will get Hampshire Wide coverage within Hampshire Police internal publications as well as an article in the local Basingstoke Gazette. I had a meeting with Lee and Alex (PC/PCSO) yesterday and they are both really excited about the potential that the discussion forum is going to open up and came in bristling with lots ofnew ideas. Alex wants students to be able to send her private messages and both are keen to develop content and make themselves available via online discussion forums to parents once we go live with the parent portal.

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Initial thoughts for the New Year

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post, so, let me start by wishing you all the best for 2009. If it is anything like mine has started it's going to be a great one! Two weeks off from school allowed for a great deal of subconcious thinking and visioning, I've come back with lots of good ideas to start rolling with in the new year. So look out for new posts that will start discussin these ideas in more length.

At the end of last term I started development work on our transition portal. Work began with a meeting with Matthew Frape (Transition co-ordinator) to secure the vision of what we want to do with the portal. Matthew worked hard last term getting feedback and thoughts from Primary headteachers and staff as to what content should be included. We're keen that this be driven by content and be exciting and engaged for the Y6 students to use, setting the tone as to the ethos behind the day to day working in a technology college. As a result of the meeting I sat down and set up the portal skeleton - have based this on our existing student portal template. Time taken - 1 hour, bonus! Now have skeleton pages set up. I'll be putting a post together as to how the transition portal is structured and what content is going into it in a post next week.

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Safer Neighbourhoods

It has now been a week since the launch of our safer neighbourhoods area on FROG. The students have really engaged with it so far, with a number of posts being put on the forum - mainly asking about our PC/PCSO who come into school every week - who they are/why they come in...

Feedback from Hampshire Police has been excellent - PCSO Alex Wheatland views the developments here at Costello as an excellent way of engaging external services with our students and helps to support the delivery of the Hampshire Children's Plan. She is particularly keen to use the forums as a way of communicating with our wider student community to develop supportive relationships and get key information out into the community. Alex has already posted on the forum in response to student postings.

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Developing stronger Community Partnerships

Over the weekend I wrote a page to be embedded in the student portal to develop our already strong relationships with our local safer neighbourhoods team. Currently our local PCSO and PC come in to school every couple of weeks to chat to students and make themselves known, developing good relationships with students in the process. We've talked about the idea of putting an online presence for them. Basically the PC and PCSO have logon's to our learning platform - they can only see the page shown here and cannot access anything else. This will enable them to put notices directly out to our students and to enter a dialogue with our students through the online forum.

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Community Policing meeting online community at Costello

I've just spent the past hour putting together an online community within our student portal for our local safer neighbourhood team - PC Lee Stanbrook and PCSO Alex Wheatland.

Both officers are able to log onto the specific community policing page which will allow them to engage with our students (and vice versa) through a discussion forum. The Hampshire police webpage for the local area is also embedded for students to access. We hope that this will provide our local police with a forum to get notices out to our student community and allow our students to engage in a more open discussion with the local police service - allowing them to ask questions of interest.

I am getting feedback from Alex and Lee next week, system will be going live to students before then end of term.

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Feedback from Parent Focus Group Meeting

The inaugural parent focus group meeting took place last night at the college and was a fantastic event from the college perspective. It will prove extremely useful in shaping where we move developments with the parent portal. What also became evident was that parents are engaged by becoming engaged - if that makes sense!

7 parents attended the evening that ran from 7pm until gone 9pm - I was only expecting to go on for about an hour and a half, but the discussions we got into were extremely interesting - for everyone! The parents represented a cross section of the college community with parents from all year groups being represented and the number present was just right to get some good discussion going. We started by giving parents an overview of FROG from a student's perspective and this immediately confirmed the need to run some sessions on this alone for parents - to develop their understanding of FROG and what it can do. I will be arranging some parent insight sessions on FROG in the new year.

It was clear that parents want more than just an online presence they can visit to get key information. Parents do want to be able to interact on many different levels and get involved with the broader community life at Costello. We started by unpicking what key data/information parents would like to have access to, the following was identified as important:

Student Progress/targets - Parents want access to targets, current working grades/levels but some sort of trend analysis. What is really important is communicating back to parents current targets to facilitate improvement (text comment).

Behaviour - Rewards/Reprimands, along with other positive comments. Not huge amount of detail -just an overview.

Attendance - Pretty much what I thought it would be. Have already discussed this with Jonathan and Craig at FROG. When parents view attendance data they would like to have flagged dates that have unexplained absences so they can send this info to the school via an online form. I.e. parents see exception report and can deal with sorting out reasons.

Key dates for homework assignments/coursework deadlines

Information on Examination courses - exam boards, specifications, past papers etc..

Student timetable

College Calendar - parents would like to be able to export the calendar in different formats (iCAL etc...) so that they can important into their own diaries - thought this was a cool idea.

Interestingly parents are not interested in accessing actual lesson content but having access to project/lesson summaries is more appropriate. For example, a couple of parents talked at length about being able to view student assignments on their diary - when they click on it a simple 2-3 sentence summary of the task is displayed - ideal when the student has not written the task down properly in their diary (HW). Some felt that having access to additional support materials was important to supplement this.

We got into the discussion about different styles of parenting and that actually having some information available to parents could have a negative impact on students and teacher/student relationships. The group felt that students could have access to some privacy settings so that they can decide whether parents can access some elements of content. For example - the discussion that takes places between a teacher and student in terms of feedback is quite private, but a student could decide to allow their parents to see this. Parents agreed that things like attendance/behaviour/grades/progress data would not have privacy settings.

All parents want good quality TWO way communication between themselves and school, a number said that this is one of the key differences between education in the primary and secondary sectors. They want the facility to send notes to students tutors. Ability to contact tutors/teachers directly through the portal - but without necessarily knowing the teachers email address. Parents felt this was important to safeguard staff. To keep things simple they would like to be able to click on a contact subject style button that would bring up a message dialogue box and then send info directly to the relevant teacher (linked to student/subject via MIS). This can open dialogue between parents and staff.

Extra Curricular Activities

These came up on a number of different levels. Parents would like to see an online database of all the clubs available (managed by teachers with basic info) that students can then subscribe to, to attend. But FROG is then used by whoever is running the club to take a register so that parents can check attendance. They felt this was important when some activities might be paid for by parents.

Online discussion forums

These were discussed in quite a lot of detail and seen as having huge potential to engage parents. Parents want to engage with a variety of different formats. Forums where they can engage with each other - parenting support etc... But also forums for feedback and advice on supporting parents. They also felt a parental forum that was Q&A between parents and the senior leadership team was a fantastic idea, with SLT response time targets. It is clear that the majority of parents want to "assist both the school and the student." Parents want discussion forums that teachers do not have access too as well.

Online Booking System for Parents Evenings

This was something that all parents said would be brilliant and would definitely get used every time. When a parents evening is scheduled, parents log on and see the time slots available for the relevant subject staff and can book slots. Print summary of bookings ready for evening - staff do same.

Online Payments

This was something that everyone said. Parents said they would like to be able to make payments for various things through the portal - such as school trips, peri music lessons - even to the extent of cashless catering systems. Parents mentioned that different payment options would be attractive such as Google checkout, paypal as well as PDQ/merchant services. The more I thought about this, the more I am convinced of the value of this service. However, online payment processing does need investigation from a school perspective in terms of how third party systems can link in with our financial systems etc...

Online satisfaction surveys

Parents are keen to support schools by providing feedback to inform strategic planning - whether it be the annual parent survey or other surveys that focus on smaller school improvement projects.

Method of dealing with forgotten password

The login page must have someway of sending a parent an updated password if current one is forgotten. Parents want the system to collect personal email addresses as they are also keen to get info pushed to them, rather than just pulling information by logging onto the portal. In terms of parental engagement this kind of tug of war is important and we'll miss out if we do not address this.

Having thought about this overnight I think parents should have a profile page (bits of which they could make public etc..) but we ensure they enter their own email address - it's their responsibility to keep this up to date. This way if password is forgotten we have an email address to automatically generate and send details of replacement too. Parents also quite liked the idea of being able to sign up for different kinds of email alert, rather than having to rely on logging into the portal all the time. This could be managed via this profile page. Think there is a great deal to be learnt from Facebook actually!

All in all a really good meeting - my head is now full of great ideas.

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Film Crew @ Costello

A three man film crew has just spent the last hour at the college working with some students, a governor and myself on a project commissioned by FROG. Students did exceptionally well in terms of explaining how the learning platform is being used. Can't wait to see the results!

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Parental Engagement: Turning Vision into Reality

I've been putting a great deal of thinking into the parent portal and reading through the Becta toolkit has stimulated an awful lot of thought in terms of what a parent portal should look like, key functionality and how it may be presented to parents. It's got me thinking about how important it is to end up with a system that is continually used by parents - has enough hooks to make sure they keep coming back for more. At Costello we are not wanting to rush into the launch of a fully fledged parent portal that sees a rush of parents clambering to access the portal, only to log on once and then never return.

As a result we're not rushing, we're taking our time, doing our market research to ensure we end up with a solution that's going to work by supporting our parents and giving them something they want to engage with and use on a regular basis. Our newsletter went out last week, I put in a big article about FROG, securing the vision of where E-Learning is going at the college as well as a request to set up a parent focus group. This focus group has a clear brief, to give parents the opportunity to help shape the vision that will drive the parent portal forward. It's going to be really interesting what gets discussed and how things may well be prioritised differently by parents.

Response has been good, with a number of parents emailing me to express their interest over the past few days - using our SMS texting service to remind parents of the opportunity certainly helped to bring in the responses - proves a point about technology facilitating collaboration and enhancing communication.

Initial meeting is going to me 2nd December and I'm going into this meeting with a totally open mind, at no point are they going to be steered at all. The meeting is going to start at 7pm and will start with an overview of the FROG implementation that our students have. We'll then give an overview of what we are wanting to achieve and outline the format of the meeting, which I expect to last for about an hour -maybe more if they really get stuck in! Am looking forward to posting the outcomes of the meeting!

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Student use of forums

One of the immediate gains and short term wins of our implementation of FROG as our learning platform is the use of forums. The school has set up a number of forums to engage students from day one and start developing a culture of collaboration, not just between staff and students, but more powerfully between students. Forums have been put in place for all subjects - creating HW help forums, forums for student voice as well as one for fund raising, FROG. Students have suggested a number of additional forums they would like. Interestingly enough these have all revolved around school related activities. We know have one for the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme as well as Computers and Technology. I see the forums as a powerful 'hook' to keep students engaged whilst staff and departments rapidly deploy there own resources onto FROG, managing the momentum of FROG and keep it going is crucial over the next 8 weeks.

The forums are also proving to be a useful conduit for communicating developments and ideas from students back to me as there is a FROG suggestion forum - the posts in here are really interesting and very insightful, showing that students have a really clear grasp of the power of the technology and how they would like to see it being used.

The way that forums are implemented works in a fool proof way, but the more we use them the more potential we can see within them to enhance engagement through ICT. Developmental points for FROG for forums:

• The most important - once you have added to a thread you get emailed when someone replies. This is crucial particularly for staff. For example, our governors are starting to use the forums really well. Unless they check the forums regularly they do not get prompted when a new post is made. Likewise if a student submits a new topic for homework request, they need to get notified as and when someone responds.
• Embed URL's into posts, rich html formatting of posts, including smilies, images
• Can see number of posts made by user - number of posts could equate to credits that have some value? food for thought.
• Can quote a previous reply as part of post
• Nested forums / sub-forums

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Lead Learners

Just a quick thought to park. We have already established students as FROG Wardens to moderate posts to the student areas. One set of forums that we have created is for the explicit purpose of students supporting each other with homework. There is a different forum for each subject. It is our aim to get a group of students to monitor each of these forums and support other students by offering support and guidance. We are going to call them lead learners.

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Musings about SIM's

Lots of recent conversations that I have had with all sorts of people (Headteachers, county advisors, SIM's administrators) have really opened up a can of worms regarding SIM's - namely assessment manager, and attendance and how data can be defined and presented very differently from one school to the next.

This may not seem like an issue for schools, but it is certainly an issue for developers. SIM's databases have grown in a very dynamic, organic way - often reflecting the people in the school and the way they work, with systems changing when personnel change. When SIM's was conceived I don't think Capita even thought that they would be opening access to the database to third parties. It is this lack of vision and standardisation with MIS data that is going to be an interesting challenge that developers are going to have to contend with - how can we get a solution that fits all schools when schools have very different looking back end databases in the way that they work.

From a third party developer's perspective I can see the problems (we'll call them challenges) that they are going to have to contend with over the next few months as products become available to present data (hopefully information!) to various audiences, including parents. Let's start with a few of the problems that I can see straight away:

• All schools use assessment manager in different ways to store attainment data on students. There is no set naming schema for aspects (fields) in SIM's that schools have been encouraged to adhere to. The only pre-defined data structure, with naming conventions in SIM's is the common transfer dataset - used by primary schools to export data from their systems which then gets aggregates by LA's and then sent out to respective secondary schools. With developments in FROG this is going to be an interesting challenge. In effect schools are going to need a degree of control as to how field mapping is undertaken so that the right data is mapped to fields in the FROG database. This is a rather simplistic analogy but it will do for the time being.
• Attendance codes - do all schools use exactly the same codes in exactly the same way?
• Volume of data - providers really need to develop live links back to the database so that large volumes of data do not need to sit on their own systems. This needs to be transparent to the user in terms of access speed. I can see FROG being at an advantage here as the majority of FROG servers are installed locally and have local access to the SIM's server. It is going to be interesting to see how web hosted solutions deal with this, they are going to need access to SIM's data over the web - this creates it's own set of speed/QoS/security issues.
• Some schools set up different aspects for reporting rather than date stamping one field. E.g. reporting a subject three times a year, aspect may be coded Art7.1,Art7.2,Art7.3. The nomenclature used will vary considerably from one school to another. This is going to cause problems when aggregating data for the purposes of presenting progress data in the form of line graphs etc
• Defining aspects, the data validation rules that schools use will not be consistent from one school to the next. When an aspect is set up, such as a grade aspect one school might just be using KS3 standard codes for levels and letter codes for things such as dis-applied etc... But other schools may be using sub-levels to give a more granular feel to progress measures. E.g. sub dividing levels into thirds (4a - top third of level 4, 4c - bottom third of level)
• The SIM's data you see is sometimes dependant on how it was input into SIM's, this is down to Capita and is going to cause headaches. It should not matter the method used to get the data into the database. Whatever way you query it, it should give the same result!
• Trying to work with the SIM's database - self explanatory! The database has been built of a number of years without Capita stepping back, rationalising systems and doing re-writes.

Being selfish and thinking about our own platform and FROG puts a number of really interesting balls in the air. It's almost as though there is the need for some sort of admin console that is the engine through which the school can contextualise the SIM's data for integration and use within FROG. Am going to have a think about this before I chat to Jonathan North on Friday.

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Governor Portal

The governor portal has been launched. All the governors were given a demonstration of the portal at the full governors meeting. The governors are pleased with the portal which is a reflection in their involvement in the procurement process. A good Q&A session was had - already governors were thinking quite creatively and out of the box as to how it can be developed. They are already using the forums to make constructive comments about the development of the portal.

Currently there 3 governor administrators, including the chair of governors and clerk to the governors. The chair of governors is very keen to see the portal develop as a vehicle to direct and steer much of the work of the governing body and can see the potential of collaboration for the future.

The video below gives you a quick tour of the key functionality found in our governor portal.

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