Work through this list before you rely on SPEDup for real documentation. It takes about twenty minutes total and it prevents almost every problem people run into later.
Day one: get set up
1. Sign in on your phone and confirm you can see students.
Open the app, go to the Directory tab, and tap Students. If the list is empty, you are either not attached to a school yet or your school has no students entered. See Join your school.
2. Check your profile.
Settings, then Edit Profile. Confirm your name is spelled the way you want it to appear on reports, because it shows up as the reporting teacher on everything you file.
3. Set up your response team.
Settings, then Manage Response Team. Pick the people who should be notified when you request admin support. Without a response team, the support button will not send anything.
Do this before you need it. The middle of an incident is not when you want to be configuring a notification list. See Requesting admin support.
4. Decide about two factor authentication.
Settings, then Two-Factor Authentication. It is off by default. If you turn it on, you get a texted code every time you sign in. Some districts require it. It needs a verified phone number.
5. Turn on notifications.
Settings, then tap the Notifications row if it does not already say Enabled. Without this you will not get push notifications for support requests.
Day two: write a practice report
Do not wait for a real incident to learn the form.
- Reports tab, Create, then ABC Report.
- Pick a student and walk through all six steps.
- On the review step, look at everything you entered.
- Then go back and delete it. You can delete your own reports, drafts and submitted alike.
Two things to notice while you are in there:
- The end time is ticking on its own. It keeps tracking until you submit or override it, which is what you want when the incident is still going.
- Every time you advance a step, your work saves. If you close the app halfway through, the draft is waiting in the Drafts tab.
Day three: look at the dashboard
Sign in to the dashboard in a browser using the same credentials.
- Look at your dashboard cards. If you filed a practice report, you should see it counted.
- Open a student profile and click Generate Report to build a data summary.
- Look at the charts. Export the PDF.
This is the loop that matters at IEP time, so it is worth running once when there is no pressure. See Data summaries.
Before you go live with your team
For administrators rolling SPEDup out to a building:
- Every school has a school code saved on its profile
- Students are entered and assigned to classrooms
- Teachers are assigned to their classrooms
- Staff are assigned to the students they are responsible for, since that is what drives "My Students" and analytics access
- At least two people in the building are administrators, so you are not one vacation away from nobody being able to add a student
- Everyone who might be on a response team has a verified phone number
- Someone has walked the ABC form end to end and knows where the six steps are
Habits worth building
Start the report while the incident is happening, not at the end of the day. Picking a student creates the draft, and creating the draft captures the true start time. Everything after that auto saves. Reports written from memory at 3:45 are less accurate and take longer.
Do not worry about signal. Write the report wherever you are. If you are offline, it saves to your phone, shows as waiting to sync, and uploads itself when you reconnect. If you finished and submitted it while offline, it submits itself on reconnect too.
Record phase changes when you change an intervention. One line in the dashboard, and from then on every chart for that student shows the date you started the token economy or moved to a new schedule. Without it, six months later nobody can tell what caused the change in the data. See Charts and data quality.