Friday, September 26, 2014

Case Management Documentation and Google Apps Scripts (Add-ons)

Well I've begun the project for this year and I expect to be done around January 2015, although tht may be wishful thinking. If I keep the current pace for progressing through each problem, I'll be done by thanksgiving, so January seems more realistic.

I have previously built each of the pieces I'm going to need for this project, now I have to connect them all and make them talk with each other. I've been able to find some great examples of code, but for all of them I've needed to tweak to make it fit my data. 

My concept is for a special education case manager to input only four pieces of info for an IEP and have my program do the rest of the job looking up things and inviting teachers. This means making at least two databases talk to each other and probably three. For right now I'm pulling the data once a semester and using that to work with. So if something changes for a student then I have to update manually on my sheet. 

The old method is for case managers to look up a students schedule and then manually input each of six teachers names and classes twice--once for the meeting invite and once for the feedback form.  This method was varying degrees of technology away from a typing pool secretary with 5-sheet NCR paper and a highlighter. Currently we've moved up to around 1998 using a word document with fillable boxes. 

So far I've figured out how to make the computer read the form input from the case manager and pull up the next form and pre-fill the answers. Next is to make it email the URL of the prefilled form to the six correct teachers. 

This will certainly be part one of my posts on this topic.  Next Post Here
Link to part 3 -- and Link to part 3.5