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Bishop Barrington School is a secondary institution, catering for students aged between 11 and 18 years old. They are located in the town of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, 13 miles from the city of Durham. Jackie Gent, Head Teacher of Bishop Barrington School ‘believes that every child matters. A child has only one school life and together, we must make it count.’
To ensure this, Jackie gets all her staff at Bishop Barrington to work hard making sure that students are happy, safe and cared for. Furthermore, the school is also very proactive in creating a strong relationship between the children’s parents/guardians.
This case study investigates how Bishop Barrington School uses Webanywhere’s Moodle SIMS Integration package to not only to aid teachers and pupils, but also parents.
Bishop Barrington wanted to upgrade their existing Moodle 1.9 learning platform. They needed something that primarily opened up avenues for collaboration with parents, students and staff. To do this they wanted a product that saved time for its teachers, allowing them to focus on the education of the children. They also needed somewhere for children to see their own progress and therefore access their own details, eg. marks and teachers feedback.
Furthermore, Bishop Barrington were looking for something that could provide feedback to a child’s parent/guardian, in relation to how they were progressing during their academic life at the school. This in turn will allow the school to meet the Government’s requirements in regards to online reporting recommendations.
When considering Bishop Barringtons requirements, one Webanywhere service was able to fulfil these needs; Moodle SIMS Integration.
SIMS integration automatically adds or removes Moodle users at the start of each academic year. This in itself saves a huge amount of time and admin resources, so Bishop Barrington’s teachers don’t have to manually set up or remove Moodle accounts. With the additional data Moodle can gleen from SIMS integration it means that it knows who has recently left school and those that are about to start.
It also saves additional time when it used for registration and when recording student behaviour, as this information, when entered into Moodle, automatically gets written in the SIMS database.
Furthermore, when a teacher at Bishop Barrington is grading work, students results are saved and automatically entered into the SIMS database, where they are readily available for other teachers to access, e.g Heads of Year. This in itself allows for improved communication between staff, so if a student begins to have problems it is easily identifiable.
The SIMS integration package also allows for Bishop Barrington parents to access their child’s information via a Moodle account, whether that’s results, timetables, attendance data or behaviour records. Using this tool automatically creates a better relationship with the parents/guardians of the children they teach. This is because it shows that Bishop Barrington School is willing to provide regular, up to date information about their child’s progress; ultimately ‘keeping them in the loop’.
Through Moodle SIMS integration, children at Bishop Barrington can access data that is relevant to themselves. This enables the child to see how they are progressing, and subsequently use their marks, or teachers comments as a benchmark.
