Speed Up Your Psych Reports!

Hey everyone! It's been a little while but I've got a great new resource for you!

A while ago, I noticed that I was wasting a lot of time typing the same things into my psychological reports over and over and over and over and... I couldn't help but feel like there was a better way. I noticed that some of my colleagues avoided this problem by copying and pasting out of their old reports, but they often expressed frustration at missing a gender pronoun or two even after proofreading, which made for some embarrassing meetings. I started researching ways to make the recurring parts of a psychological report go faster and smoother.

First of all, I hit upon the idea of using a Custom Office Template which contained my letterhead and a lot of information that was generalized to ALL psych reports I write. This led my reports to look like something like this:

Student Name: Insert Name Here
Student Grade: Insert Grade Here
Reason For Referral: Insert Reason For Referral Section Here

My next breakthrough (after upgrading to Office 2013) was to create more narrowly-individualized Quick Parts for large chunks of text that needed some degree of customization (such as the Reason For Referral section for a re-evaluation). After entering in my quick part, I could go through and use the "Find and Replace" setting to customize everything further. Eventually I had three or four Quick Parts for each assessment instrument in my library. After pulling the quick parts, my template looked something like this:

Student Name: Name
Student Grade: Grade
Reason For Referral: Name is a Grade grade student at (REDACTED) Elementary School. Name was referred for an evaluation by his/her parents due to the fact that...

 The final piece was discovering that I could use Custom XML Variables embedded within the template and the Quick Parts to automatically include individualized information which gets repeated multiple times in the report. This caused my report (with the quick parts added) to look something like this:

Student Name: <Name>
Student Grade: <Grade>
Reason For Referral: <Name> is a <Grade> grade student at (REDACTED) Elementary School. Name was referred for an evaluation by <his/her> due to the fact that...

...admittedly that doesn't look like too much of a change, but when you consider that if I enter the student's name in place of where it says <Name>, anywhere that the student's name appears in the template or in any Quick Part automatically and immediately updates to the thing that I've replaced it with... now we're in business! I noticed that I was taking about 30 minutes to one hour less on average to write each report I was generating!

Of course, I wouldn't be the school psych nerd that I am if I didn't pass these time savings right along to you, dear reader! I've compiled a two-part YouTube video series on how to make these changes yourself. Check it out using the links below!

 

 

Pain-free Daily Behavior Ratings

I don't know about you, but the teachers at my schools really dislike Daily Behavior Report Card ratings. They love having the daily behavior data, but there are just so many things that can go wrong...

• The sheets can get lost in transit from the teacher's desk to my desk or to their case manager's desk.
• Middle schoolers can lose them in between classes
• Teachers can forget to complete them due to the daily ins-and-outs of their class routine
• And on, and on, and on.

While consulting with some of my special education teachers recently about students with behavior plans, I showed them one of the ones I had created online using Google Forms. The meeting ground to a halt, as they wanted to know EXACTLY how to create a similar form, so I made a video to show them how to create one on their own. If you want to learn how to use Google Forms to put together a great and user-friendly Daily Behavior Report Card, check out the following video from my new YouTube channel.

Greetings!

Hello and welcome from your friendly neighborhood School Psych Nerd!

I'm Jake, a school psychologist who has just started his second year in the field. I've done a lot of learning throughout grad school and from my first year on the job. I'm looking forward to learning even more, and hope that this blog will be a useful tool for continuing to learn and helping others learn with me.

I may not be as much of an expert on school psychology topics as some of my colleagues who have had 15 years in the field, but I'm pretty good with technology if I do say so myself.  I describe myself as a "reformed disorganized person" who has found technology to be a great enhancer of (and sometimes replacement for) executive functioning skills.  I hope to share my knowledge of effective technology techniques, as well as pick up some new tips and tricks from others who might be interested in the same topics.

Since this is my first post, I thought I'd take a minute to talk about what this blog is for:

• Tools - I'm pretty much always on the lookout for good tech tools for school psychologists as well as educators in general.  When I find something good that already exists, I'll be sure to share a link here.  When there isn't a tool that does exactly what I want, I have been known to create my own... and I'm of course happy to share those creations with everyone too.
• Reviews - The school psych profession and education in general experience changes in the technological landscape very quickly, especially in recent years.  I'm an early adopter of a lot of these technologies and will use this space to share my experiences working with them.  My reviews will focus on the "user experience and ease-of-use" side of things (and less on the "opinions on theory diving development" side... I'll try to let my colleagues in academia handle that stuff).
• Commentary - I'm hoping that as the blog progresses, people might be interested in using the comments sections to go back and forth about issues related to the posts.  I'm happy to share opinions in comments and hope to be challenged to think about things in different ways by dialogue (as long as dialogue is respectful and on topic).

As far as my intended audience goes, I imagine that fellow school psychologists will get the most out of the site.  I hope that it is also useful to school counselors, instructional coaches, teachers, and even students.  To help everyone find what they need, I'll tag each article for groups of people who might have an interest in it.  Searching by tag will help keep teachers from having to read a bunch of updates about things that only other school psychs will find of any use.  I'm looking forward to the journey, and excited to have you along for it!