“I’ve been working in the education sector for more than 25 years, and spent time working as a teacher. I remember all too well the challenges that came with assessing pupil’s progress and recording that in a paper based or separate computer systems – it wasn’t just difficult to keep everything organised, it was also practically impossible to align the evidence you had recorded with other important information about the pupils you taught. These challenges are exactly why our SIMS Next Gen My Markbook is so exciting.
My Markbook simplifies the assessment process by enabling teachers to record the outcomes of tests, observations, evaluations, skills competences and more all in one place, on any device, from anywhere.
One of my biggest frustrations as a teacher was having to use paper-based record systems, and later Word or Excel, which ended up messy, time-consuming, often unreliable and not reflective of my evaluation. In My Markbook, you can record what you want, how and when you want to record it. You can customise your markbook for individual classes and enter the results of all assessments, using our pre-defined assessment types or ones you create yourself, so you can monitor pupils’ ongoing progress in a way that suits you and your class.
A teacher’s time is precious, and My Markbook saves that valuable time by keeping you up to date with changes like pupil premium or SEND, so you can be ready for any resulting differences in lesson planning or preparation. Like the rest of our SIMS Next Gen products, My Markbook accesses all the student data stored in SIMS, and automatically syncs with SIMS to give you instant, real-time information from across the school. Teachers can view a list of students in any of their classes and add extra columns to the markbook to see contextual student information alongside their results.
With this, you get an immediate picture of every student’s progress, and producing evidence for Ofsted or for parents’ evening is as simple as clicking a button, limiting your reliance on data managers and giving teachers more freedom to access their students’ data.
I am so excited that My Markbook is the first of many upcoming SIMS Next Gen Secondary Assessment products, which will free up data managers’ time and make recording standard and ad-hoc assessment data really easy for teachers.
My Markbook will be available to all our early adopters from June 2023. By joining our programme, you will get access to the SIMS Next Gen products for secondaries that have already launched, including Lesson Registers, Pupil Contacts and Staff Profile instantly, as well as being part of our continuous programme of development and create the future of school MIS.
Over his 25 year career, whether that be from his time as a teacher in a classroom, or his current role driving innovation in Secondary Assessment with SIMS Next Gen, Paul has a passion to support schools with technology that delivers meaningful insights and helps improve learner outcomes.