How to: Pull a CAASPP Accommodations Query from SEIS

For my department and perhaps others who need to prepare and verify student accommodations for state CAASPP testing I have recorded here a procedure to setup a query from the Special Education Information System (SEIS) that will give all the information needed.  Once you have set up this query, you can save it for next year.

Here goes:

• Step 1: Search -- After logging in to SEIS, find the "search for students" link on the left side-bar of your home screen (see below right). Click that link and you come to a new screen asking for "Search Filter" and "Columns to Show".  
• Search Filter allows you to select only the names you want, which could be useful if you wanted only the 12th graders graduating or only the 11th graders potentially moving to a Transition program, etc.

This could be useful.

• Step 2: Filter -- For today's CAASPP data, I put the first filter to "Case Manager" is like "Andrew Hyland" by clicking the drop down menu and scrolling down to case manager (Marked "1" and "2" in the picture below left).  
• Nearly every box on the IEP is listed in the drop down box in alphabetical order, so the first time you create a query there will be a lot of scrolling (don't use your touch-pad chromebook unless you have to!). 
• Step 3: More Filter -- Another filter I used for this was to click the "Not" box and select "grade level" and use Shift+click to select all the grade levels 9 and below (Marked "3" in the picture below).
• This was because CAASPP is done by credits, so we need to include 10th, 11th, and 12th graders from the SEIS list just incase their credits put them eligible for SBAC or the 10th grade Science test. (It's doubtful to me that 9th graders would be credit-eligible for the 10th grade Science, but it could happen.)

• Step 4: Columns -- Anyway, now the filter is set.  Next, select what information you want to pull from SEIS.  Each drop box in the "Columns to Show" section (marked "4" above) will be a column in the report you create.  I scrolled through and picked the information I needed for CAASPP, shown below right. To add columns, simply click the green plus sign (marked "5" above).

• Quite a bit of scrolling through options, but we only have to do it once.  The order of your choices from top to bottom ends up being the order of your data columns from left to right.  So, be careful to put things in the order you want.
• Step 5: Save and Print -- Click "Search" at the bottom of the page and you get to the results page which previews the students and data columns you've selected.  From here you can name the query and save it as marked in the picture below. Then select print.
• You are almost done, but I'll mention that there are some powerful options on this page. You can print only a sub-set if you don't need every name in the data (check the boxes next to the names you want to print and save some paper!) 

• Step 6: Group and Sort -- After saving the query for next time and clicking print, the next screen asks you how you want to group and sort the data on the printed page.  For this situation, I told it to group by grade level and did not sort.  
• If the admin. pull a large amount of data, they could group by case manager and then sort by grade level.  Or, you could sort by participation in CAASPP and it would place the kids who have accommodations on top of the list for you (otherwise it's just an alphabetical list).

• Step 7: Print -- Just like you do for SEIS, click print and wait for the pdf to load.  Print as usual.  Repeat for next year.

Enjoy, I hope this helps and came in time for this year's testing.

How to: Email your Teachers from a Form Submit

I lost about an hours worth of typing and pictures in this post, so I'm going to type up another quick version that won't be as cool.  Trust me, it was awesome.

+Ken Daniels asked me about making autoCrat (Thanks for this awesome tool, +Andrew Stillman and the New Visions School team), the awesome sheets add-on, email his teachers at his school.  I don't know his particular situation--when I set my version of this up, it was to invite teachers to a meeting based on a student's schedule.  So there was a lot of tables and looking up going on.

The easiest way is to have the user enter the email addresses into the form you are using to collect data, but I hate having users make mistakes and also having them manually look up and retype stuff that the computer should do for us.

Here's my solution:

AutoCrat will run off of a form submit now, so that's cool and that's how I'll use it here.  I like to make the form as simple as possible.  I've made a sample one that collects the teacher's name.  

You'll need a spreadsheet list of teacher email addresses to look up from and the names you get from the form submit should be exactly the same (that's another problem altogether).  Again, when I used this type of thing, there was a step in between where my form collected student data and then looked up teacher names and teacher emails based on that (student names are much less prone to errors in my experience since teachers are used to entering them exactly--or you could easily use the student id number which reduces potential for error a bunch).  Here's a sample.

In my email sheet, I've exported the complete addressbook from Outlook for my school site.  To help the look up, I've made the leftmost column into a list of the teacher names in the same format as the teacher names appear in our student database.  There's a couple ways to do that, I currently prefer the =JOIN() command until I learn a better method.

Then I made a named range from the columns.  Technically for this lookup, you only need two columns--however, you could also do this lookup from a much bigger table if you needed. The named range makes it easier to write the formula for looking up emails, and allows you to add or subtract staff members each year as people retire/get hired without having to go back and manually change every single formula.

When you connect a form to the sheet, it will create a new sheet.  As each response is listed, it will erase all data in the newest row.  This means that any neat formulas you have in the response collection tab will be deleted every single time someone submits a response.  The way to deal with this that I've found has been to make another sheet and use the =IMPORTRANGE() command.  Images below.  

Once the range is imported, it will auto-update with new submissions and it will allow you to make formulas in the columns to the right of your imported data.  Now we can lookup effectively.  

After importing the range, I make a column that includes teacher name data exactly as it appears in the email lookup sheet. See the =JOIN command below.  In the next colunn, I've used a =VLOOKUP command to lookup the perfectly formatted teacher name in our named range at column 6 (where the emails are sitting).

You can look up any of these commands with the google help file and it explains pretty clearly all the options and parameters for each.

I like to wrap my formulas with =IF(ISTEXT(), my current formula, "") so that I can copy down the formula to all cells in the column and it won't display errors and #N/A and be ugly.

Getting autoCrat to email is now simple, you can have it send an email to multiple recipients or whatever you want using the dollar tags (for example: $emailAddress ) as one of the options in that add on.  each time a response is submitted, autoCrat will run and fill in the email with whatever you tell it and send to all the dynamically changing emails that pertain to your current submission.  I find this to be a little bit of extra work, but it avoids the problem of hard-coding a bunch of emails that will eventually change.

I hope this is helpful to Ken and anyone else who might need it.  I know it's a down and dirty version, and it will help if you've got a mid-level familiarity with excel/spreadsheet functions. i.e., this "guide" is not very newbie friendly, but here it is.

I know if Ken needs anymore support on it, we'll end up with a GHO and I'll attempt to record that and link it here as well if we get there.

Case Management Documentation and GAS Part 4

I'm writing this down so I can remember why I did things the way I did when I have to go back and either fix it or make a new one somewhere else:

"The less change the better" is a simple motto for some folks. I wanted to keep the new method (my form) of getting Gen Ed feedback as similar as possible to the old method, so I kept the same wording and the same order of questions.  I simply lifted them on to a google form which will plop the answers down in a sheet that autocrat turns into a nice PDF that looks identical to the version we use now.  The output keeping the same look is only important to me so that the admin and district people who are used to seeing our forms can feel comfortable.  More important is that the "front end"--where the Gen Ed teachers look at it--looks as similar as possible.

Here's where my problem arises: I have to add some pre-filled, superfluous "questions" to the form so that autocrat will spit out the the PDFs exactly how I want them while keeping the formatting customized to each student.  Information such as student initials and case manager emails are easy for a spreadsheet to look up and calculate, however, this behind the scenes look up has to happen before the form submits to autocrat (without reworking my entire concept and workflow here).  So I will make it part of my case-manager-side script, but that means that I have about 4 extra questions hanging off the end of my Gen Ed form.

Perhaps I can find a way to make them invisible in the future, or end up reworking the entire work flow.  For now, better to make a working product before getting ahead of myself.

That's all for now.
Links:
Link to part 1
Link to previous part
Link to next part

Case Management Documentation and GAS Part 3.5

Part of being a Special Education Teacher is giving  parents progress updates on goals at least as often as their non-disabled peers.  At high school, that means once per quarter.  So doing goal updates this week and next has put my side project on break for a minute.  In spite of that, I was able to solve one small problem with my script.  I was able to get the script to take the IEP date information (from whatever the case manager puts in) and have it spit out a pretty and formatted text string (instead of a weird date code that computers read!). This solves a little problem I was having at the tail end where the printout would show a long date string including time--which I didn't want on that piece of text.

As an aside, goal updates are another beast that might benefit from some automation during certain parts of that process.  That's a long term thought I'm letting simmer and cook on the back burner.

Case Management Documentation and GAS Part 3

Well, moving forward on this project.  I now have the script getting all the values from the case manager submitted form and then looking up successfully the course schedule for the student from a second spreadsheet of schedule data that I pulled from the Aeries student database.  At some point that could be a live lookup, but for now it's dependent on a human to keep it accurate and up-to-date.

Next, it pre-fills the course info and IEP meeting information on a form for the General Education teacher to fill out and emails the teacher with a link.  When they click the link, it brings them to the feedback form already in progress with almost half the information already filled in.  No longer do they have to fill in their own class and double check the IEP date and time. (of course, at this point the IEP could get rescheduled, but that should be a separate thing on their calendar for another project at a later time!)

One item on my list is to make this Gen Ed version of the google form look slick and professional by using the school colors and logos now that Google allows us to customize their forms in that way. I'll get this pretty good looking before I show it to my Admin., but all that is cosmetic and the guts of the program currently work how their supposed to.

The next step is an Autocrat PDF creation off of my template feedback form that I created about a year ago for VHS.  I have 3 or 4 tweaks left on it at this point, until the Admin. sees it and offers changes.

At this point I want to record for posterity the methods I used to dump my spreadsheet data.  I had to go into MS Outlook and find my campus's "All Staff" email list.  Then I added all the names on that list to my contacts in Outlook.  This was in the Outlook program, not webmail like a lot of people like to use for outlook.  When all the names are in your contacts, you can export your contacts as a .csv file that will convert nicely into google sheets or excel, etc.  It has loads of empty columns that I don't use, but it has about 3 that I needed to get.  These were the account names of all the teachers and staff on campus.

All our district has the domain @vacavilleusd.org but their account names are different.  Usually it's the first name and the last initial (which I could make up with a spreadsheet function if it worked all the time).  However, sometimes there is already an "AndrewH" account and they do "AHyland" as the account.  So now I have that list from which to pull email addresses whenever I need.  I made a named range to look up in and concatenated the account name with the vacavilleusd.org domain.

I did some similar data pulls for schedule from Aeries (teacher, course, period) and special ed info (like testing accommodations and behavior plan status, dates for next IEP, etc.) from SEIS--our Special Ed Information System.  I can detail how I pulled those later so that I can replicate them next time and for any other campus and/or district that might use this idea.
Links:
Link to Part 1
Link to Previous Part
Link to Next Part

Case Management Documentation and Google Apps Scripts Part 2

I believe I have the script completed for the first half of my project. At least, I can make the computer fetch and use all the data in question. One bump at this stage is turning out to be triggering the script in such a way that it will run completely and automatically when a form is submitted. That might be a huge task if I end up having to make half of the data lookups happen inside the script instead of inside the  spreadsheet.

In any case, the next step will be the easy part--automating the general education feedback PDF production using the autocrat add-on. 

I think a more expert programmer would spot some areas where I have clunky code in my script, but I'm making progress each day. This will be my first real work project in programming and when it works I will have something to brag about. 

Link back to Part 1 and Link to Next Part

More Google products for educational uses.

I enjoy the ability of Google+ to send me posts that I can really engage with.  Of course, I have connected with some fun things and games for enjoyment on Google+.  So I get a lot of that in my feed which is nice so that I can decompress from work.  I have also added a good number of education related groups and ed-tech groups.  Sometimes I flip past those posts if I want to avoid melting my brain from too much work-thought.

Today, a post grabbed my attention because it was asking for a solution that I know how to provide.  I left a short comment, knowing that I also wanted to post here on the topic.  The poster, +Jennifer Fox, asked for some follow up so here's what I put together--I hope it was what she was looking for:

Original problem:  "Is there a way to sort responses from a Google Form as they are being gathered on the response sheet?"
My response: Use either VLOOKUP or IMPORTRANGE functions to copy the data to a second sheet and filter/sort that sheet.  Then the original collection sheet continues to get live responses and you can still organize your data.
My example:  I created a sample google form to collect fake data with numbers and letters, i.e. something to sort multiple ways.  Then I went to the spreadsheet where all the responses were collected and created a second sheet (named "The Magic").  On the second sheet, I used the importrange function to copy the data and then I selected all three columns of data (this makes sure that when you filter, the rows of data stay together) and applied a filter.  Now I can sort and filter the data and new data from the form automatically comes in whenever the users complete the form.
I also got to learn a little from the other comments in the thread--specifically, that there is an SQL-style query function in google sheets.
So, that was a win all around!

More thoughts on automation

As I sat in the allergy office and watched the nurse enter data into my record, I immediately realized another use for autocrat in my daily work. Any time a task is repeated in the same way, I should be able to get a machine to do it. The trick is getting the information into a format the machine can use and then into a format the humans can make sense of. I might have solved half of those problems while waiting for the doctor to come.

In my job we give formal academic testing to each student every third year. There are a number of different sub-tests and even different main tests that the district likes to use. All of the tests and scoring programs I've used will spit out an electronic report in either (or both) a Word document or a rich text file (that's the .rtf extension).  I need to learn how to get a machine to parse through the text file, convert the standard scores from tab delimited text into spreadsheet data, and then run an autocrat-style mail-merge into the generic report template.  The spreadsheet could also talk to a student data information system (info dumped from SEIS?) and use the student's unique ID number to look up gender and then put in the correct gender pronoun in the tedious parts of the report--replacing the "his" for "her" is always difficult or at least time consuming.

I would leave the summary and recommendations up to the report writer, so the final document that the computer spits out cannot yet be a pdf.  Autocrat can handle that, however.

I think this would be a highly useful tool for case managers who are interested.  One benefit is that not everyone has to use this system if they don't want to.  Also, it should be quick and easy (relatively) to set up and get working now that I know a little of what I'm doing with the scripts.  The first step might be the hardest for me--making the computer parse a text document and convert.

This little project will be on the back burner until around March 2014, I think, due to some meetings coming up . . .