Sometimes we all need a visual. This week’s tip focuses on using the Trend Charts feature of My Day Web App, which allows you to instantly display your data in a chart. I find My Day Web App’s charts especially helpful during team meetings when I want to quickly show how a student is doing that is easy to interpret by staff and parents. Often plain numbers do not have the same powerful effect as a colorful line showing the improvements students made; therefore, I always attend meetings with a chart. I find that showing these charts conveys my data better than any number or any explanation I could give. I also find that using the Trend Charts feature helps me immediately see whether or not students are closing the achievement gap, maintaining, or regressing (the trend lines option really makes this apparent). This powerful trend information helps me make better instructional decisions sooner to help students continue to make progress on their goals.

An example of a chart with a single goal displayed and the trend line feature enabled.

Using the charting feature also saves hours of time. When using the Trend Charts feature, you can customize the title of your chart, how many goals you want to appear on a single chart, and whether or not you show trend lines and data values, all with the click of a button. As a teacher, I used to spend hours graphing my data on a clunky program that took way too long to figure out how to get data to display the way I wanted it to display. Also, I was on a constant loop of data entry when moving information from paper to computer to program to program. It was our goal to make My Day Web App’s Trend Charts easy to use, easy to interpret, and fast. Let’s give a silent cheer for no longer spending hours manually creating charts in a different program to use at meetings that may only take 20 minutes. All the data you need to create beautiful and powerful charts is already entered into the program, which makes converting it into a chart showing trend lines instantaneous. These charts will help you make effective instructional decisions to benefit all of your learners, and that’s our ultimate goal.

An example of a chart with two goals displayed, trend lines, and data values.

Happy Teaching,

Sara
Side note: don’t forget to print your charts in a landscape orientation to best display all of your information.

Whether it be a substitute or another option for dinner, having a plan if something goes wrong is always a good thing. Backing up data is no exception. Hard drives can be fussy, which is why My Day Web App uses a secure cloud server to store all of the data you collect. However, no matter how secure the cloud server is, it cannot protect against human mistakes.

As someone who is prone to human mistakes (because I’m human and usually in a rush), I always appreciate having safety nets built into my programs or data storage. That is why we made sure My Day Web App has one built into it, too. Before you delete anything (which will result in data loss), a warning message pops up asking you if you really do want to delete the item.

My Day Web App includes safety nets such as this warning message.

We’ve also made the language very clear on the warning message to avoid confusion about whether to click “yes” or “no”. That way, if your finger slips (or you are in a hurry like me), you can make sure you are deleting what you want to delete and nothing more. Your data is important to us; we want to make sure we can help you keep it safe.

Happy Teaching,

Sara
P.S. If you would also like an additional safety net, you can always print summary reports periodically for your records or save them to your computer as PDFs via the print screen.

Data analysis. I know it sounds terribly boring and complicated, but it doesn’t have to be (at least not if you use My Day Web App). Analyzing data is probably the most crucial part of ensuring student achievement. As teachers, we are often swimming in data; however, it is what we do with that data that matters most.

When you run a report using My Day Web App, you are given a total percentage of objective achievement based upon the amount of time you choose for the report (see my blog post on Choosing the Right Report for more information on which report type to choose). This percentage is found either in the middle (for a specific time slot and objective) along the right side (for how a student did overall on their objectives during a certain time slot), along the bottom (for how a student did overall on a specific objective during the entire day), or in the bottom right corner (for how a student did on all of their objectives over the entire day). It is great to have those percentages instantly at your fingertips, but our job as educators and school staff is not done.

An example of a Summary Report for a student working on behavior goals.

The great thing about My Day Web App is it allows you to look for data patterns with students. Some questions you might ask include: “Which parts of the day or with which objectives does a student do well?”, “Which parts of the day or with which objectives does a student struggle?”, “Why does a student do well or struggle during certain parts of the day or with certain objectives?”, “Is this happening over long periods of time or short ones?”, “Is the student showing growth or regression?”, or “How can I help?”. You should also make sure to analyze not only the percentages but the number of successes with the number of opportunities. For example, 67% may look lower than expected, but upon closer examination, you notice the student achieved that objective 2 out of 3 times (which is almost every time). Percentages can be deceiving. That’s why the longer you can collect data, the better the percentages will reflect the achievement.

An example of a student’s graph for structuring numbers to ten.

A new feature of My Day Web App is the Trend Charts feature. This feature allows you to instantly create a graph of the data you collected, allowing you to visualize what is happening with students. Again, this helps you see when a student may need extra support and think about why the support is needed. The data also helps you think about whether or not you need to change your instruction. You can select which goals to graph so you can focus in on one thing at a time or everything at once.

I hope this helps give you ideas about how you can make powerful decisions with the powerful data you collect using My Day Web App. We encourage you to comment or email with questions about how you use data to help make powerful decisions in the classroom.

Happy Teaching,

Sara

This week’s post focuses on a useful feature of My Day Web App, the Blank Reports. We made sure to include Blank Reports as a feature in My Day Web App in case you’d ever want to print blank copies for use by a long-term substitute. Also, you can use blank forms with other teachers or team members so they can collect data during their time slots. Finally, connections to the Internet fail. Having a master copy of each student’s report ensures that you can still take data until the Internet connection is restored. As a teacher, I know having a backup plan is critical. That’s another reason including Blank Reports on My Day Web App was so important.

A Blank Report

Blank Reports are also useful to show students when discussing schedules, their objectives, or anything else you’d like to share with them. Students can also use Blank Reports if they need hard copies to take on field trips or just need hard copies to keep with them; some students need that tangible item with them at all times as a visual reminder of their goals. Discussing progress and self-monitoring is very motivating for students. My Day Web App can help facilitate these discussions.

These are just some of the ways Blank Reports can be used. I encourage you to email us or comment on how you use Blank Reports to fit your needs.

Happy Teaching,

Sara

The last tip was about the difference between Daily and Summary Reports. What better tip to compliment that post than a tip about printing these reports. One could argue that posting a baking tip about donuts you can make and enjoy while you analyze and run reports would be a better compliment than a post about printing, but if I continue to talk about the topic of donuts, I might need to stop typing and start baking something delicious.

Back to printing. Sometimes you may need hard copies of reports. After you run a report, a print icon will appear in the top right corner of the report you are currently examining. When you click on this icon, it is important to change your printing orientation (or layout) to landscape. Otherwise, your beautifully summarized data may be cut off. This will require you to make another trip to the printer, which I know can take a lot longer than expected (i.e. “Why is the printer jammed?”, “Is that a line?”, “I need more ink. Where’s the ink?”). I want to help you avoid that experience as much as possible. Other than changing the layout/orientation, printing from My Day Web App is very easy. If you notice that too much of your objective or time slot titles are cut off, consider shortening them or use the trick discussed at the end of a previous blog post, Choosing Objectives.

I know that was a short post, but as teachers every minute of extra time is invaluable. Now, about those donuts…

Happy Baking Teaching,

Sara

Greetings fellow My Day Web App users! I sincerely hope My Day Web App is working well for you and helping to make your data collection and analysis quicker and easier. Again, please email us with questions or comments on your experience with the web app. We love to hear your feedback, and it helps us better meet your needs.

This week’s tip focuses on Daily vs. Summary Reports. I thought I would take some time to explain more about each to help you best choose which one to use when you are looking for reports on student performance. Let’s start with the Daily Report.

The Daily Report will display the daily data for a student’s objectives and time slots for up to seven consecutive days. You can scroll backward on the calendar if you’d like to see the month before the one that is displayed. This report is best when you want to print or email daily data to parents or other staff members. It also works if you are looking for short-term patterns—for example, to examine if a student is increasing or decreasing his or her objective achievement over a few days or a week. If you are running a report for yourself, you have the option to run multiple students in the same report. This would be great to use for your own records. However, if you are planning on sharing data with others, it is best to run a report for each student one at a time to protect students’ confidentiality. When you choose the Email to Team option on each report (which shows only if you add team member emails under the Team tab), My Day Web App will only email that particular student’s data to the team members entered on the Team tab for that student–even if you are running a report for multiple students. However, when large amounts of reports are run at once, it is easy to lose track of whose report you’re sending. Just a thought from a teacher who triple-checks all of the reports (My Day Web App or otherwise) I send. Seriously. It’s a habit.

An example of a Daily Report. This report summarizes daily data for up to 7 days.

The Summary Report will run a single report averaging all of the data you’ve collected on a student consisting of a time period you select. You can also run multiple students at the same time, like the Daily Report. I often use the Summary Report for my end of the quarter or semester grades and progress notes. This report instantly averages all of the data I’ve collected on a student (or students) so I don’t need to spend hours averaging it myself for my entire class. The Summary Report is also helpful when looking at progress over weeks at a time, looking for trends in objective achievement, or anything else that requires summarized data. It’s also cleaner looking than the Daily Report since each student only receives a single summative report as opposed to a long list of reports (if you’re running multiple days in the Daily Report tab). As with the Daily Report, it is best practice to run reports on one student at a time if emailing the information to others. However, if the data is just for your records, it is very helpful to select multiple students at once. Additional tip: If you ever need to change the dates of reports or the students, simply click on the New Report button in the top right corner of your current report to start over.

An example of a Summary Report. This report summarizes data collected during the dates you select.

I hope this blog post helped to clarify the difference between each report and how you can pick the best report for the information you need.

Happy Teaching,

Sara