Goal Graphing, another improvement

In the wake of our recent improvement that allowed dates to be listed on printed graphs, another request came into my inbox to have the name of the goal printed on the graph as well.  Well, that only makes sense, so from now on, this is what your student progress graphs will look like:

That text at the top is the goal text, so when you print this graph off, you'll have no problem remembering what it applies to.

Do you have an idea for an improvement to therapylog?  Let us know!

Student Goals and their Limits

A couple weeks ago, I got this email from Beth White as SSD:


Hello- In trying to get my caseload set for next year, I started erasing old goals and adding new ones. However, I realized the teacher that is seeing that student NOW still needs those old goals in there because she hasn't billed for them yet. I didn't realize that it's all ONE thing. I thought that under my log on name was what I controlled and what was under someone else's log on name they had what they set up. Apparently that's not the case. I forgot what student it was, but I deleted all OT goals because I thought it was just extra stuff that I didn't need, but now the OT is going to wonder what happend to all her goals... In the future could we make it separate? Am I explaining this correctly? Thanks 


Unfortunately, this isn't the first time we've seen something like this.  But we can't exactly make them separate for different therapists, because those goals are part of the IEP, which belongs to the student.  However, given how frequently we've been confronted with this issue, we've decided to try tackling it in a sensible way.  As of today, here's how goals work:


- goals can now be categorized as "PT, OT, ST, or ALL". 


- If you are a PT, than you will see all student goals for your kiddos that are categorized as "PT" or "ALL".  Same for the other disciplines.


- If there are goals in the list that you don't think belong to you, just set them to the category you think they belong to, and they won't show up in your list anymore (either when looking at the students goals or when scheduling services).


Now, we aren't sure yet if this is going to create any issues, which is why it's something of an experiment.  If this works out, great!  If not, we'll roll it back and try something else.  

A Tweak for your Lesson Plan

Here's a small change requested by one of our therapists at Jackson R-II, Mary Holzum.

Mary pointed out that she'd really like to be able to put boxes on her lesson plan so that she could check off successes or failures on student attempts right on the same sheet.  It's a small enough thing that we decided to take care of it this same week, and now when you print off a "Detailed Lesson Plan" for a day, this is what you'll see:

There are 10 boxes over on the right (underneath the progress numbers) which you can use however you like.  Mary mentioned that she uses pluses and minuses to keep count of each attempt, so if that sounds like something that works for you, great!  However, we've also tried to put it in a place that wasn't used for anything already, so if this little addition doesn't matter to you, it shouldn't detract from anything you're doing.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mary!

Little things matter

Just this week we got a request from one of our users in the Spokane school district, Donna Brown:


It would really help me out if students somehow appeared in alphabetical order, especially on the reports. It seems they just appear in the order maybe that I added them to the system, but when I print a report for all of my students to do my progress reports from, it takes forever to search for the student that I am currently working on. Thanks, Donna 


Not wanting to bite off more than we could chew, here's where we started:


Donna,

That seems quite reasonable.  Which report are you specifically referring to?  Let me know and I'll see what we can do to alphabetize it.

~Ethan

She was quick to get back to us with a reply:

Progress summary is the one I use most often in this way---even when just wanting to print the report for one student, the drop down list just seems to have them listed in random order so that you have to search for the student there as well.

Thanks

Loud and clear!  We got the message, and now we've taken care of it.  The student progress summary report is now alphabetized, both when selecting which student to run it on, and when looking at multiple students within the report. Thanks for the suggestion Donna!

~Ethan

Warning! a helpful note

 Back in November (quite a while ago, time flies doesn't it?) we got a request from Sandy Holterfield who's one of our most helpful therapists:


would it be possible to get a warning if you have marked the therapy as individual and then have more than 1 student in the time slot. I know I have done this by accident. It would have to be just a warning and not a total lock out as sometimes you schedule several but end up with just 1. I'm loving some of the changes! 
-Sandy Holterfield


At the time, I thought it was a great idea, but we've had a ton of development going on in therapylog and I just never found the time to schedule work on it.  However, with summer approaching, we're getting just a bit more breathing room, so I'm now happy to announce that this has finally been put into place.  From today forward, if you select an "Individual" therapy and accidentally schedule more than one student for it, you'll see this message:

it's kind of hard to see on this screen shot, but what is says is "WARNING: You have multiple students scheduled for an INDIVIDUAL therapy type".  This isn't a "lock out", so it won't prevent you from scheduling your therapy, just a helpful reminder in case that's not what you meant to do.  Thanks for the suggestion, Sandy!

how about a date?

Around two weeks ago, we got a great suggestion from one of our therapists:

I love that this program presents an option for us to view the progress of our students in graph form. I would love it even more and highly suggest therapylog incorporate specific dates within its graphical formats for the progress of students. Thank you, Mindy Zucchini M.S. CCC-SLP 


At first I was confused, after all we do have date information available on those progress graphs, so I wrote back:


Mindy,

Hey there, I'm glad you like the progress feature!  I think currently if you hover over a data point, it should give you a little box that tells you the date the data point is for.  Does that cover what you're looking for, or do you have something else in mind? 

~Ethan

I thought that might be the end of it, but Mindy pointed out something really obvious that I'd just never thought about:

HI Ethan,

Thank you for your email and quick response to my inquiry. You're right, if I hover over the graph, the date is viewable on this program. However, the date is not on the graph when it is printed.

Thanks,
Mindy

She was right!  We had these great graphs, and they let you see your students progress by date, and they let you print them off, but once they printed there was no way to tell what point was for what date anymore!

We couldn't let such a glaring hole in the system stand, so as of today we've made a step in what we think is the right direction.  We don't know if it will perfectly suit your needs, but thats why we want you to try it out...So you can let us know!

Here's what the graphs look like now (as you can see, the dates are visible now at the bottom of the graph):

Thanks for the suggestion Mindy!

Hey reader, do YOU have a suggestion for something on therapylog you'd like to see improved?  Let us know!  It's our job to make this website as useful as possible, and we can only do that when we know what you want!

~Ethan

Copying full Days of Therapy, and how we keep you speedy

As a therapist, I'm sure you already use our day copying feature.  If you have a day full of therapy this week, and it's basically going to be the same next wednesday, we give you the ability to just copy all the scheduling data from one day to the other so that you don't have to go through all the work of scheduling that again.  We think it's a great help!

But here's the problem.  The average page request on our system takes a little less than 1/2 a second (that's how long it takes between when you click on something and when you get to the next page).  Because of how much data there can be when copying one day to another, that can take sometimes 7 or 8 seconds to get all the data moved.  It's a long time to have our system locked up when there are other users trying to access other pages.  So, we've worked on a comprimise that we think will give you the same copying feature, but good performance for everyone else at the same time.  Here's how it works:

Here I have a day of therapy that I want to copy:

When I click Copy Day, it takes me to this form:

I pick what day I want to copy to, (or which two days, in this case), and click Copy, and the copying is sent off to our background queue (which doesn't affect the performance on the website), while you go back to the calendar.  If you look at any of those days before the copying is complete, you'll see this message:

There you can see that the copying is still going on. You can go copy a different day or do something else on the website while this is happening.  After about 30-60 seconds, if you come back to any of those days, you'll see that the copying is done:

And everything is back to normal!

We're always looking for ways to make our website more useful (and less slow), so if you have ideas or suggestions, we'd love to hear them!  Leave us a comment and we'll get back to you letting you know what we think we can do to make your feature idea happen.

Help is on the way!

Over the last two years, your suggestions and feedback have helped us grow into a company with a lot of software (and a lot of demands for modifications to that software).  It's been getting tougher for our team to keep up, so starting in the month of May we've brought on a new hand to help spread the load around.

This is Tyler, and he's in our offices helping to make all the changes that you keep asking us for.  Tyler, you want to introduce yourself?

"I grew up in Springfield and have always been considered what most would call a geek, I've always had a strong desire to figure out how things work and improve them. This passion for learning and technical ability led me to Mizzou for a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering as well as my current pursuit of a M.S. in the same field.  I also have some insight into the field of counseling through my mother who has worked for several school districts in the Springfield area first as a special needs instructor then as a primary counselor."


We've found Tyler to be a great fit, and as we continue on you may find him communicating directly with those of you who are continuing to push our product into the next version (be nice, he's new!).  Welcome, Tyler, we're happy to have you!