Data Made Simple: How Early Childhood Administrators Can Leverage Google Sheets
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Early childhood administrators must track, organize, and manipulate many kinds of data in many areas of their work. Organized and actionable data is needed for family applications and surveys, environmental assessments, learner assessments, licensing requirements, budgeting, and more. Knowing how to collect, review, and visualize data for various audiences and business processes is an important part of your role as an Early Childhood Leader.
Google Sheets is a free online spreadsheet tool that offers ways to collect, store, manipulate, filter, analyze, and visualize your program data. It also integrates with other Google services to connect sheets to forms, emails, documents, and other tools. Your data is only as powerful as your ability to understand it, use it, and present it to others. Google Sheets has many built-in capabilities designed to make your data work for you.
You can use Google Sheets to make your data more impactful and actionable. Some examples include:
- Filtering through multiple applications by the response to a specific application question
- Using pivot tables to show change in learners’ progress over time
- Creating visualizations of program data that can be included on websites, marketing materials, and reports
- Creating QR codes to share surveys with your families easily
- Checking for valid email addresses on a marketing listserv
These worksheets can pull data from a website, create visual charts and graphs, and send information from one sheet to another.
Here are some specific examples of how you might use Google Forms as a program administrator:
Use filters to see differentiated data quickly.
Let’s say you are reviewing applications for open slots across multiple different early childhood locations you manage. You could create a filter from a larger database to see applications for a specific site or age range. You can then save those filters so that they can be used again.
Pivot Tables allow you to save and analyze your data without changing the source data.
Learner assessment data over time could be entered into a Google Sheet quickly using an assessment tool built into a Google Form. Pivot tables could then be used to show score averages quickly, score changes over time, and scores above or below specific cut scores for intervention.
Create visualizations of data for reports as tables and charts.
Input spending in different areas of your business into a Google Sheet, and create a pie chart showing the spending percentage in each area. That pie chart can easily be added to other documents for reporting. The charts can also be automatically updated when new data is added to the sheet.
Embed Google Translate into a worksheet to use the sheet to translate words from one language to another!
In our upcoming technology training, Displaying Data with Google Sheets, we provide an overview of some of the key features of Google Sheets that can help Early Childhood Administrators save time and make the best use of their data. We will offer hands-on practice so that you leave feeling confident about your ability to implement what you have learned.
Register here to join this free Webinar—we’ll help you use your data to make an impact.
Leslie Layman, M.S., is Director of Strategic Initiatives for the McCormick Institute for Early Childhood at National Louis University (NLU). In this role, she supports early childhood professional preparation, alignments across Early Childhood professional learning and academics, and innovations in early childhood workforce development. She holds a master’s degree in Child Development with a Specialization in Children with Special Needs from Erikson Institute. Prior to working at NLU, she was the Director of Teaching and Learning at Harry S Truman College, where she designed and implemented learning environments, courses, professional development, and technology supports for faculty, students, and staff.
