St. Croix River Education District

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SpEd Forms, Inc. is a software company based in Jasper, MN.

SCRED, our member districts, and the vast majority of MN school districts use SpEd Forms to write and store special education and Section 504 paperwork.

SpEd Forms 2.0

SpEd Forms has been upgrading the look and feel of their website to Version 2.0. Eventually, they will phase out Version 1.0 of the website. Here's 🎥 how to upgrade to SpEd Forms 2.0 (7:48).

Log In

Open the SpEd Forms website. You can set up your school Google account to be your login.

Features and Tips

Saving Work

If you find that you're angrily waving your fist in the air, chances are, it's because you forgot to press the save button while working on an evaluation or IEP in SpEd Forms, your computer froze, and—tragically—all of your hard work was lost. In severe cases, symptoms of this affliction may also include crying and rocking back and forth in the fetal position under one's desk. Please, please remember to frequently save your work in SpEd Forms. It will not automatically save work like Google Docs does.

When you finalize a document (see below), SpEd Forms will finalize the last version of the document that you saved. For example, if you wrote a PWN with 25 sentences, clicked the 'save' button, wrote 5 more sentences, and then clicked the 'finalize' button without saving again, the finalized copy of the document would have 25 sentences, not 30.

Finalizing Documents

When writing IEPs, evaluations, PWNs, etc. in SpEd Forms, we're looking at the "working" versions of these documents rather than "finalized" copies. Think of a finalized copy as a snapshot photo of the working document at a specific point in time. It's a permanent digital copy and is available in the 'History' menu in SpEd Forms

Whenever paperwork is sent to parents and also printed and filed in a student's special education folder, it must be finalized in SpEd Forms. For example, as long as you have remembered to finalize an IEP after the annual IEP meeting, you can complete an amendment later in the school year and both versions of the document will be available for reference in the future. Finalizing documents is also important because SpEd Forms often updates their forms over the summer months, and in these instances, data from unfinalized documents is lost.

Switch Student Function

Wherever you're working in a student's module (e.g., IEP, progress report, etc.), the 'Switch Students' button will take you to the same document in another student's file. This is very useful, for example, when you need to complete multiple similar amendments.

Spell Check

SpEd Forms does have built-in spell check functionality (see an 'ABC' button at the top of each page); however, it isn't automatic. You have to click the 'ABC' button for SpEd Forms to identify your spelling errors. As such, it's easy to end up with paperwork dotted with errors that would normally be caught by spell check if you were working in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Many case managers find that the free Grammarly extension for Google Chrome is a great support because it offers contextual spell check and grammar check functionality.

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