A while ago we had the great nightmare of a Maths Tracking software that was written by educators. It took so bloody long to get it working that I was ready to personally visit the company to put forth my case against their product.
And now one of the teachers had the bright idea of ordering some science assessment software. I know exactly what happened. Rep came in, showed off the software working perfectly on their rep laptop and wowed teacher with it. What teacher didn't see was the complete mess of the program beneath the shiny surface. Doesn't like loading on a network, doesn't like being on a secure network drive, demands full admin access for all users, has to be individually configured to see the central database on every workstation and to top it all off doesn't recognise the imported SIMs data the way it's meant to.
I had to create a csv file from SIMs, break it down to individual year groups, format the data properly and then import it. And even then, the stupid bloody program doesn't accept it. The date of birth field was the best: Must be in the format dd/mm/yy. Which is what I imported. Stupid Science software then registers all of our Year 1 test pupils as being born in 1902 and 1903. Stupid, stuid software. In the end I had to go into each pupil entry and delete the date of birth year 02 or 03 and replace them with 02 and 03. Press update and all is okay. But Richard, you say, surely you actually haven't made any changes at all? And that is true. But stupid, stupid software then recognises dates as 2002 and 2003.
Tomorrow I have to go through the whole farce with years 2-6. Looking forward to it greatly.
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