Data Collection

[Guest guest]

We have developed a system at The Mariposa School for taking data and keeping

things organized. It is called " Pocket-ABLLS " because each of the goals is put

on a laminated card which you can carry around in your pocket as you follow the

child's EO's outside of a therapy room or away from a table.

The idea is that you mark on these cards in grease pencil whether they got it

independently or prompted. (You circle an I or a P). Then, after the session,

you go back and transcribe to the notebook. It's very quick, and it allows you

to pay attention to the child during the entire session, rather than flipping

through pages of papers.

We also have developed a set of FFC cards with about 20 different categories.

Each card has an associated datasheet with all of this information on it.

You can check our website www.rtphome.org/Mariposa for a description of the

system and samples of the cards and datasheets. Just follow the link for

" Pocket-ABLLS " .

We hope to have this ready to begin marketing in the next couple of months.

We've been using the cards at our school for a year now, and have been making

adjustments along the way. (I think this is our 4th or 5th version of FFC

cards.)

I still need to figure out what the cost is to make these up before we start

selling them. My thought is to make the cards, and send out a CD-ROM with the

data sheets on it so they can be printed off as needed. There are 1146

regular goal cards, and 320 FFC cards. The plan is to sell them separately, as

some people just need FFC's, and others just want the rest of the goals.

One problem we have run into with printing data sheets is that it seems that

WORD acts differently on different machines and operating systems. For

example, when I moved everything from my Windows XP machine to another machine

running Windows ME, all of the formatting was completely off. I may need to

put everything into Adobe Acrobat to make sure everybody could print it

properly.

I'd like some feedback from people as to whether this is something they would be

interested in purchasing. Right now, the bottleneck is laminating the cards.

It takes about 5 hours for each set of FFC cards, and about 15 hours for the

regular cards. If we purchase a faster laminating machine, then of course the

time factor goes down. (But we'd need to sell enough sets to offset the cost

of the laminator.) Alternatively, I may be able to find some place to outsource

that to.

If there is anybody out there who has experience with production issues such as

I've mentioned, I'd appreciate any advice. :-)

Right now, I think the cost is probably going to run somewhere between

$200-$300. I'm curious to hear from folks as to whether they would be

interested in purchasing a system like this.

(Cary, NC)

persistentC@...

President, The Mariposa School for Children with Autism

www.rtphome.org/Mariposa