Resource Thursday: Data Tracking

I am a special ed teacher. I took many, many a special ed class in college and they all had one theme: DATA. Data is your key to success in all realms. Want to find the root of a behavior? Data. Want to prove that an intervention is actually working (or not!)? Data. Want to be a rockstar reliable teacher? Data.

Via my main boo, Pinterest, I found a wonderful, marvelous resource back in May. The little pin took me to Teaching Special Thinkers' amazing tutorial showing how to incorporate Google Docs into IEP data tracking. Genius, I tell you. Especially when I saw that I could super easily use my iPad to enter the info.

That super informative tutorial, coupled with her other Google Docs post, led me to begin creating my own forms and documents- Thus far I've made family contact forms, student interest forms, family volunteer interest forms, classroom teacher info forms. Boom baby. And the best part? Google is going to record my answers and track them on a spreadsheet. Hello, easy data!

Though most people these days have computers, I'm all about respecting those who don't so I'm going to let the families choose a hard copy of the forms or sign up on an e-mail list at meet the teacher night. The delightful gen ed teachers will also have the choice (because I'm all about helping- if I'm gonna differentiate for my students, I may as well differentiate for my co-teachers too, right?!), but I want to strongly suggest we do them via Google Docs. I was at first nervous that I would have to find a way to convince all of the teachers to make a gmail account or find a decent way to integrate Google Apps into the browsers of all of the teachers, but y'all, the best part ever? 

I just got my new district e-mail address AND GUESS WHAT. THEY OPERATE ON A GOOGLE PLATFORM. Reason #90345 why I'm positive the Big Man planned this job for me.

The next phase of this resource is going to be making Google Doc forms to track data for IEP goals, but I want to make sure I work with the gen ed teachers to make forms that will work for both of us. We all know that it is easier to incorporate a strategy that you helped design, and that you're probably more likely to take data in a way that makes sense to you and works with you classroom.

Update on my File Organization:

Basically there has been no progress here, if we're being honest. I emptied 10 boxes in my classroom and it still looks about the same... Definitely need to do an inventory before I can start organizing!

**Y'all, ask me how many times I said data in this post. The answer probably is more than 10.