Tech For Admin: Recording and Organizing Behavioral Data

Finding time to gather behavioral data on students can be a tough task for a teacher. Yet, keeping and maintaining data is what allows a teacher to effectively implement their lessons each day for maximum learning. However, gathering data isn’t always done just because it is a good practice, when Individualized Educational Plans come into play, it become a requirement for teachers.

Behavioral data collection requires more thought and intentionality to collect that academic data, which can be collected thought assignments or testing. Instead, in order to effectively collect behavioral data, it must be collected throughout the entirety of the class. Some teachers keep clip boards, but the result of that is a new pile of papers that they must keep track of and then when they need to look up data on a specific student, they have to search through multiple sheets of papers to collect it all. Others keep it on their computer, but they may not have access to their computer at the moment, and to gain access to it may take away from time they are helping other students. There must be an easier way!

The Teacher Assistant app, which is available for all phone formats can help with that and even comes in a free LTE format (though I recommend at least spending $1.99 to buy the unlimited action add on). This app allows a teacher to create a profile for each student, complete with parental contact information, it allows a teacher the ability to quickly make a note of any behavior that see from a student (positive or negative), and it even allows the teacher to email the issues home to a parent so that they are not blindsided come an IEP meeting that the IEP has not been helping with a behavioral goal. Best of all a teacher can easily carry their phone around and have access to the class no matter where they are at, and without having to have piles of paper work to sort through when the time comes. Everything they need for behavioral issues for parent meetings, IEP meetings, or staff meetings, is literally in their pocket.

If a teacher wants to spring $5.99, they can get some extra features like a randomizer (for putting students into groups) and a “blast email” that can notify large groups of students about important classroom information. However, that’s a post for another time. I want to show you a few features of the app that can help monitor student behavior.

How to Use:

When you open up the app, you will get the home page. From here you can click on students and add a student profile and create a class. 

When you click on student you can create student profiles by clicking on the "+" button in the top right corner. When creating a student's profile, you can choose while class lists to put them in and add parental email and phone numbers to their profile to allow you to contact parents when necessary.

   

Once all of the students have been added and placed in a class, you can go back to the homepage and they show up on the first day. You can go to the homepage and click on the class section, then which class it is that you are teaching and a list of your students will pop up.  On the classes screen you can add new classes by clicking the "+" icon. Also, after selecting a class you can add students to that class by clicking on the "+" icon. 

When you need to add student data, just click on the name of the student, and it will pull up a log of their actions. On the bottom right corner, there is a "+" icon, click that and you will get a screen to choose an action to document. 

When you get to the action screen first you have to click on action, and choose a behavior that you have witnessed.  You can also add more actions by clicking on the "+" icon on the bottom left corner of the action screen. Then you can click on description and make a quick note of exactly what happened, you can even take a picture of the result of the action (I highly suggest not taking a picture of the student). 

Once you have time later, you can fill the in the rest of the report on your phone. If using the app to mainly collect data, each event may not need a to be completely filled in. Fill in what you deem necessary. If using this for collect data for an IEP, many of the issues may not result in a "Response" and many of the actions by default will be in the classroom. Also, parents will not need to be notified. The choice is yours how to use it.