The first answer we always hear is ‘time.’
What are your biggest challenges? What do you need to do your job better? If you could wave a magic wand, what would be your wish? These are the questions we ask every chance we get — and the answer from all teachers and admins is more time.
As special educators who spent 9 years in classrooms in Brooklyn, NYC DOE, we’re very aware of how hard the job is for both teachers and administrators. Combine the challenges inherent to teaching students with learning differences, the advocacy of the parents who understandably want the best services for their children, and the state and federal requirements for compliance with IDEA, and you’ve got a job that requires near superhuman stamina and patience.
Regrettably, the situation for SPED teachers and admins is made worse by a system that has failed to provide 21st century tools and technologies to educators to create efficiencies and lighten the load. That includes workflow and collaboration tools and continuous professional development — made possible by modern-day software applications.
We we can give teachers and admins their time back, simply by applying these technologies.
With support from a seasoned special educator, and one of our customers, Pati Miller from Dieringer School District in Washington, here’s a few ways that EdMod helps to lighten the load for special (and general) educators and give these overworked heroes some valuable time back to focus on kids, not paperwork:
1. Creating a snapshot for every student – Many schools and districts create ‘snapshots’ of the IEP, or IEPs at a Glance,’ (a practice I first tried to incorporate in 2007 with word documents and physical binders for my school) and distribute them to teachers and the start of the school year. While helpful for teachers, this is a time-consuming task in the weeks before and when school starts.
EdMod removes the need to create IEP snapshots entirely by making all the key information available at-a-glance, 24/7. One admin told us EdMod saves her about 80 hours of work in creating and distributing IEP snapshots and reports.
2. Accessing the IEP system – IEP systems were built for compliance, not for instruction. They are not teacher-friendly nor intuitive to navigate, which makes searching for & sharing necessary data a time-consuming and frustrating affair.
EdMod, on the other hand, was built by teachers, for teachers. We take all the data that you need from the IEP system and put it in a digestible and clean format, tied directly to the student. Our research indicates that teachers access EdMod about 14x more frequently than the IEP system.
3. Searching for strategies & accommodations – When we survey teachers about how they find resources and materials to help them modify instruction for students with IEPs, they tell us almost unanimously that they are “on their own.” Teachers tell us they search on Google, Pinterest, and Teachers Pay Teachers to find what they need. This can take many hours a week, hundreds of hours per school year.
We don’t believe teachers should ever be ‘on their own’ to find good materials, so our team curates hundreds of research-based strategies, each with its own “toolbox” of resources that give teachers everything they need to start using it in the classroom.
4. Using Email to Communicate & Collaborate – Teachers tell us that email is their primary tool to communicate with their fellow teachers around a student’s needs and challenges. Email requires a lot of effort to be useful for direct collaboration. Emails can easily get lost or buried in the inbox, and formatting issues can make it difficult to find them later.
EdMod creates a single space for collaboration that is tied directly to each student. EdMod allows an entire team of teachers to communicate about each student using a simple, streamlined format that makes it easy to track and search.
“We had our first grade level team meetings today and we used the Team Board to capture notes- it is now an evolving, real-time record that we can use and keep referring to over time.” ~ Pati Miller, Dieringer School District (WA)
5. Sticky Notes, Binders, & Google Docs – We are consistently amazed, but not surprised, to hear from teachers and administrators that sticky notes, paper and binders are still how most IEP information is kept and shared. Keeping track of paper and binders is incredibly time-consuming, as is dealing with the repercussions of lost data that inevitably results from such a system. Some schools use Google Docs, which is a great improvement. But even with GDocs, we hear that they can quickly become unwieldy as it becomes hard to find what you’re looking for when the number of docs grows exponentially over time.
EdMod allows teachers to integrate the documents, records and data they need directly to each student’s Learning Biography. All teachers know where and how to find the information they need, for every student.
“One of my favorite things about EdMod is that we can now attach IEPs to the learning profiles and all the teachers have access to it. So whenever there is a schedule change, we don’t have to worry about it. Confidentiality is not an issue and we don’t have to worry about who is seeing what or what is updated for whom.” ~ Pati Miller, Dieringer School District
6. Transferring “Professional Memory” from Class to Class and Year to Year – One of the greatest inefficiencies we experienced as teachers was the transfer of what we call “professional memory” from one teacher to the next. This can occur within a school year as a student moves from one class to another, or at the start of every school year as students move up a grade. We felt that rather than relying on the proverbial “staff room chat,” teachers should have an easy and efficient way to transfer what they learned about a student to the next teacher. The current ad-hoc method results in teachers having to start from scratch every fall and “reinvent the wheel” for every student. This is a terrible system for both teachers and students.
With EdMod, the teacher’s professional memory stays with the student, following them to their next teacher.
“We have a para educator staff that is always changing and we gave them access to EdMod, so this staff can use this to reference and print sub plans, etc. You have all the information you need.” ~ Pati Miller, Dieringer School District
To learn more about how our team is working to give time back to special educators and administrators, visit us www.educationmodified.com, or email info@educationmodified.com to schedule a demo today.
