Alternatives

Support Planner: Alternatives

----------------

Up
Learning about
How it Works
User Group
Shared Resources
Implementation
New Users
Extending users
Lift Off!!
Upgrading
Database Contents
Keeping things tidy
Some conventions
Q&A
Importing students
Alternatives
What it does

There are alternatives

As the Tasmanian Department of Education moves towards incorporating student support functionality into StIMS it will consider a range of software packages that may have something to offer. As such packages become known they will be described and linked from this site.

1. School Wide Information System (SWIS™)

SWIS™ is a web-based software system for collecting and summarizing office discipline referrals in schools (direct quote from the SWIS website). It processes and reports on behaviour incidents by type time and location. It is a tool for the school's Behaviour Management Team to track incidents, that is, it is incident driven. Monitoring is largely limited to ongoing incident tracking.

Advantages of SWIS™ (functionality not found in the Planner at this stage) are

it provides web-based access to the data and reports
its produces graphs of incident types by place and time.

Note: monitoring behaviour using SWIS™ is very similar to using Time and Place in the Planner

What SWIS™ doesn't do

On the other hand SWIS™ lacks any direct capacity to manage some important information including

Student history
Alerts
Performance/Needs ratings
Goal
Support Actions
Agreements
Time table
Contacts
ISPs - Individual Support Plans
and the full range Observations (except for conduct cards)

SWIS™ is heavily hard wired (most options are pre-set) which makes data entry easy and consistent but also limited. It is very behaviour/discipline oriented. While giving a good account of 'problem behaviour' it makes only modest contributions to inschool conversations and the capacity of participants to manage their own activity. Its make limited (and often negative) contributions to conversations between key stakeholders (staff students & families); the development of action plans; nor to school accountability.

Cost is typically a modest $US200 per year per school.

2. Peacekeeper

PeaceKeeper™ is an Australian product with functionality and limitations similar to SWIS but operates on the school network (like the current version of the Planner) rather than being web-based. It claims to be the only application of its kind.

One interesting feature (not found in the Planner at this stage) is its capacity to automatically email alerts to the Principal when a student has been involved in certain number of incidents. Schools can establish their own codes and categories.

Cost $A2500.

3. StIMS - Student Information Management System (DoE)

StIMS is the replacement for SACS and is currently under development by the DoE - for more DoE information click here. It is intended for implementation across all Tasmanian schools and colleges in Term 3 2007.

Summary

PeaceKeeper™ is probably too expensive for most schools

SWIS™ is a very useful, well-priced simple system for tracking problem behaviour. It can be implemented across the system right now (it is web-based and hosted online by the developers)

The Planner has far greater functionality than either SWIS™ or PeaceKeeper™ because it enables schools to

know what is happening
work with others to improve what is happening, and to,
make it easier for the next person to do well