Thursday, November 10, 2011

Tracking Data with NoteCounselor

Unless you have been living under a rock somewhere in a remote forest, you have heard about the importance of accountability in the world of education.  School counseling, is no exception.  This is only my 3rd year as a school counselor, and the budget has had me worried every year about keeping my job.  My 1st year, the "higher ups" wanted the elementary counselors to show how we had spent our year; how many students we helped, parents we met with, guidance classes we had taught, etc. Luckily, I had tracked my sessions and classes the "old fashioned" way with paper and pencil notes.  After submitting our data, administration was able to see the impact we have on our school community, and thankfully, counselors were not put on the list to be cut in our county.

This year, another elementary counselor who works in our county told me that she uses NoteCounselor (created by Amanda Lee Chambers).  Three years ago, when she was asked to send in her documentation, all she had to do was pull up a yearly report, with just one click of the mouse!  The day she told me about this program, I went online at http://notecounselor.com and ordered it. Four days later, I got NoteCounselor in the mail and started using it, and I would definitely recommend it to all school counselors.  It provides a very simple format, using Microsoft Access, that allows you to keep notes, track individual and group counseling sessions, log classroom guidance lessons, and much more.  It also categorizes task as indirect and direct counseling services and prints reports accordingly making it easy maintain a comprehensive program at your school.

Take some time to visit http://notecounselor.com/.

Does anyone else use this program? If so, leave a review here and, if not, tell us what program you do use.

**noteCounselor, LLC copyright © 2004, 2007, 2010 Amanda Chambers
**Microsoft Office Access is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.

1 comment:

  1. Hey Allison. Thank you for the positive review! Would you mind if I used a quote from this post for my noteCounselor website? I am (finally) updating my website. :)

    ReplyDelete