Main Menu screen is split into 3 main areas. The General Admin area, the Assessment Area (used by subject teachers to track pupils progress and to write reports and the Tutor Group Admin Area where form tutors can monitor and print reports that have been written.

The Staff Details screen for storing details of the current staff. A link to a signature can be formed here which will appear on the reports written by that staff member

Pupil's Details screen stores all the data on the pupils. A user with Teacher Access level can only see pupils in their form/tutor group. Administrators can see all pupils. The current subject groups of each pupil are also shown, but cannot be edited here.

If you already have pupil data in a spread sheet you can import them to Report Writer to save hours of work.

Subject Group screen where subject teachers can creat their subject groups and make any changes to them once created. To create a group select the appropriate information on the left, select all the pupils in that group (use the tab or control to select multiple pupils) and press 'Add'.

Archiving goups at the end of each year is even quicker simply press 'Auto Archive' and this will archive all the subject groups of the teacher currently logged on

The Tracking screen allows you to give a mark or grade up to 4 times a year for various assessment criteria which you set up on another screen, and also a start and target national curiculum grade (yr 7,8, 9) predicted GCSE grade (yr 10, 11) , predicted grade (yr 12, 13)

Any of this information can be included on the reports.

Some schools like to include some course/subject specific info on the reports. This can be typed up and stored on this screen or you could create a link to an external file from another application such as a Word or Excel document

This report text can be used from year or created new each year and archived when no longer needed.

The Report Writing screen allows you to quickly create a report for each pupil by selecting their name from the drop down box. You can then work through these reports typing comments into the white areas for learning strengths and Improvement areas or by selecting comments from the green comment bank area and clicking add.

Comment banks are input and edited on another screen.

This image shows a default report provided with Report Writer. It contains all the possible info each report can contain. The good thing about Report Writer is that you get a free customised report to match the one used at your school (even if you are using the trial version). It can have as much or as little of the information indicated on the report above as you need. Size, layout, font etc can also be changed. You will need to send or e-mail (info@iddservices.co.uk) a blank report to enable me to do this. I will then send back a customised Front End.

The Tutor Group screen is used by the form tutors to keep track of their groups reports as they are being written. Tutors are able to view a summary screen to get a quick overview of which reports are outstanding. Send an electronic message to collegues to remind them to get a move on, meet me down the pub after school etc, print of reminder slips of outstanding reports that can be slipped into pigeon holes under doors etc. They can view the actual reports, print them of, e-mail them to parents and then archive them to remove them from the system. Archived reports can no longer be edited and will not show up in the usual placed but they are still accessible by clicking the 'View Archived' button. If they are no longer required ever again they can then be deleted from the Archived Report screen.

This screen allows you to send a message to collegues. The message will keep popping up on their screen untill they click the 'read' button. And will then only appear once when they first log on. To stop this happening they must delete the messages. Making it hard for collegues to say to you they never received it :0)

This is the main menu of the slimmed down portable version that you can place on a laptop or on removable media to use at home. The assessment area allows you to view tracking data (useful when you are wrriting a report on a pupil and can't remember too much about him/her) and open the screen to write reports

The two buttons on the right are important. The Refresh Data button should be used before taking the portable version away from the school network, it ensures that all the data it contains is current and up to date. The Transfer Reports button is used to transfer the reports you have written to the main database on the school network.