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.
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My Day Web App is a web application designed to collect and help you analyze powerful classroom data that can be used to make powerful decisions for your learners. It was designed for teachers by a teacher and her software developer husband (aka Bright Egg, LLC). Visit us on our blog, website, Twitter, or Facebook for more information.
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