You will need to have been granted admin permission to Observations. If you do not have this and require it, please speak to your organisation's BlueSky lead or get in touch with our team.
Whether it's coaching notes, formal lesson observations or simple check-in's, you can create any number of custom forms in our Observations area and staff can easily create reflective records against any of the available forms using the Self-Observation option.
Creating your scales
To get started you'll need to first think about whether your form has a scale or visual response option. This can be as simple as a Yes, No, Not Seen or you can create an entire scale with up to 9 values. This can allow you to collect quantitative data without making judgements.
- Head to Admin and select Observations from the left navigation menu. This will expand a sub-menu of 4 options. Select Observation Forms.
- Select the Scales tab.
- Here you can see any existing scales. In this example, we already have a simple Yes, No, Not Seen response scale. To view the scale simply click on the name.
- Select Create Scale in the top right corner.
- First, you need to label the scale, this is only seen in Admin and will not be visible to users, so make sure it's descriptive and/or easily identifiable against any other scales you may create.
- There is a maximum of 9 scores available, by default, no response is recorded so it acts a built-in 10th response. Select Add score to reveal your score options.
- Score - this field is alphanumeric i.e. A, 1, or NA but there is a character limit of 2. You can leave this blank.
- Label - this is the descriptor. This tells you and the user what this score means and is required to create a score.
- Colour - lastly, you can apply a colour to each score. Be careful not to use the same colour for multiple scores, when you report it will be difficult to differentiate.
- As you complete each score, simply press Add score to generate new fields for your next one. If you need to you can press Remove score or overwrite the fields.
- Once you're happy press Save. You can then view the scale by clicking on the Name. You can see the Label (descriptor) when you hover over each score. Should you need to, you can then edit the scale at this point.
Once the scale is attached to a form and has been used you can no longer make any changes to the scale without deleting any attached records.
Now we're ready to create our form! Continue to Part 2 >