Introducing SPEDup 2.0

Why we started over

SPEDup began because a teacher had a stack of ABC reports on her desk and no reasonable way to make sense of them. That problem has not changed. What changed is how much we learned watching people use the first version every day.

The forms were too long. The keyboard covered the field you were typing in. Reports disappeared when the wifi dropped in the gym. We could have kept adding features on top of all that, but the things people complained about most were baked into the foundation. So we rebuilt it.

Everything you already had came with us. Same students, same classrooms, same reports, same years of history.

Writing a report

The ABC report used to be one very long form with about eighty fields on it. It is now six steps: student and time, antecedent, behaviors, consequences, CPI and restraint, then a review screen before you submit. Each step checks itself as you go, so a missing field turns up on step three instead of after you have filled in all six.

Behavior sections are collapsible now, and the detail fields only appear when you tick the box above them. You are not scrolling past twenty questions about physical aggression to get to the one about elopement.

The end time tracks itself. Start a report while an incident is still going and the clock runs with it, showing you the duration as you work. Tap once to set the time yourself, tap again to hand it back to the clock. No more guessing at four in the afternoon how long something took at ten in the morning.

Your work saves as you go. The moment you pick a student, a draft exists. Every step you advance saves it again. Drafts sit in their own tab and open right where you left them, so an interruption costs you a minute rather than the whole report.

It works without a signal

This is the one we are most pleased with. The gym, the bus loop, the far end of a portable. The places incidents actually happen are usually the places wifi does not reach, which is a strange thing to ask a teacher to work around.

Now you write the report anyway. It saves to your phone, shows up in your drafts tagged Waiting to sync, and uploads itself as soon as you are back in range. You do not have to remember it or type it twice.

If you finish a report and submit it while you are offline, it submits itself when you reconnect. It will not sit quietly as a draft waiting for you to notice.

When you need help right now

There is a support button in the header of every screen. Tap it, pick the student and classroom, say what is happening, and send. Everyone on your response team gets a text message and a push notification straight away.

Alerts now have a lifecycle. Pending, then acknowledged, then resolved, with a timeline showing who responded and when. A request for help cannot quietly go unanswered anymore, and the person who sent it can see that somebody picked it up.

Finding the patterns

Open any student on your phone and you get their behavior distribution, trends over time, ranked antecedents, ranked staff responses, and patterns by day of week and time of day. You can look at the last week, the last month, the last quarter, or everything.

On the dashboard, data summaries got two additions that we think change what the charts are worth.

Phase change markers. Record the date an intervention started with a short description of it, and a labeled line appears on your charts at that date. Because phase changes belong to the student rather than to one report, you add “started token economy” once and it shows up on every summary for that student from then on, across any date range. Someone opening a summary six months from now can see the intervention history without being told about it. Whether something worked becomes a question you answer by looking.

Any staff member can add one, not just administrators. The person running an intervention is the person who knows when it started.

Blackout dates. Districts can mark holidays, breaks, professional development days, and closures, and those days come out of the analysis entirely, the same way weekends already did. It sounds like housekeeping. It is not. Without it, a two week winter break enters your data as fourteen days in a row with zero incidents, which quietly pulls every trend line toward “improving.” One person sets the district calendar and every school’s analysis is correct.

A dashboard that knows your job

The old dashboard showed everyone the same thing. There are now four, and they are genuinely different rather than one view with rows hidden.

Teachers see their own reports for the week, their students, their drafts, and their average incident duration. That draft count is worth calling out. Unfinished documentation is now a number in front of you instead of something you discover three weeks later.

School administrators see the building. Reports this week, escalations, average duration, a thirty day behavior trend with five behavior types tracked separately, and the eight most common antecedents ranked. That last chart changes conversations. When “transition” is sitting at the top of a building wide chart, you are looking at a schedule problem rather than eleven separate student problems.

District administrators see every school side by side, including the schools with no activity at all. We kept those visible on purpose. A school that has stopped documenting is the most useful thing on that chart, and it is exactly what a top performers view would hide.

A strategy email on Fridays

This one is new. On Friday afternoons, teachers who logged reports that week get an email that looks at the last seven days of their data and suggests two or three evidence-based strategies to try next week.

Every suggestion is built on what your own reports actually show, and each one names the Applied Behavior Analysis approach it comes from. It explains why that approach fits the pattern in your data and gives you one concrete thing to do Monday morning. It reads like a colleague glancing over your numbers on a Friday, not like a compliance report.

We were careful with it. No student information is ever sent to the AI. It sees counts and patterns only, so how many incidents, what time of day, which triggers came up most. No names and nothing that identifies a child. It will not cite studies or authors, because that is where AI tends to invent things. It will never suggest restraint or seclusion. And it is entirely optional, with an unsubscribe link in every email.

Signing in

SPEDup is now a certified ClassLink application, which means your IT team can add it from the ClassLink library like any other approved tool. One setup covers both the app and the dashboard, and you sign in with the district account you already have. Email and password still works for districts that do not use ClassLink.

Text messaging is also fixed. Our carrier registration had been rejected, so alerts and verification codes did not always arrive, which is a serious problem when the entire point of an alert is that somebody sees it immediately. That is sorted out now.

What happens next

Everything above is live. Sign in the way you always have and your data will be waiting for you.

Most of what is in this release came from someone telling us what was not working. The offline reports, the shorter forms, the keyboard fix, the draft count on the dashboard. If something is still getting in your way, we would genuinely like to hear about it.