Val Verde USD · School Counselors

Use-of-Time Pilot

You are one of three counselors trying this before the rest of the department sees it. About ten minutes to get going, and the point is to find what is wrong with it.

What you do not need

No new password No software to install No calendar to set up No categories to memorize No exporting No shared drive

Getting started

Sign in with your district account

Click Sign in with Google and choose your @valverde.edu account. That is the only sign-in.

Choose your name

The first time only, it asks which counselor you are. Pick yourself from the alphabetical list. This connects your log to your name, so it is always yours.

Set your work schedule

In the right-hand column, set the hours you actually work and which days. It starts at 8:00–4:00, Monday to Friday, in 30-minute blocks. Change the increment to whatever matches how you think about your day — 15 minutes, an hour, or free-form if you would rather type exact start and end times.

Log a block of time

Click + Add task. Set when it started and how long it ran. Then answer the questions — you are describing what you did, not choosing a category.

Was a student with you? → Yes, a student was present
What were you doing with them? → Teaching
which records as Instruction · Direct Services

Most entries take two taps. Then pick the activity and the area it was about — Academic Readiness, Career Readiness, SEL Readiness, Attendance or Discipline.

Log a few days, then look at My Analysis

Once two or three days are in, open My Analysis. It shows where your time went against ASCA's target of 80% or more in direct and indirect student services. Save as PDF gives you a one-page handout.

Worth knowing

It saves itself
There is no Save button. ↶ Undo takes back the last few changes.
Log the whole day
Including the parts that are not counseling. Time you leave out still happened, and gaps quietly flatter your direct-service percentage.
Lunch and breaks
Record them. They are left out of every percentage, so they neither help nor hurt — the day just reads as complete.
Time off
An hour or a whole day. Day off… marks a full one. Time off is taken out of the day you are measured against, so a short week never looks like an unlogged one.
Your log is yours
You are the only person who can add to it. Student Services sees totals and percentages, not a commentary on your day.
It works on a phone
Same address, same sign-in.
Signed out after an hour
Google does that, not the tool. It should sign you back in on its own; nothing you logged is lost.

If you track your day in Outlook

You can import it instead of typing. The ⬆ Import calendar button sits at the top of your time blocks, next to + Add task.

From a screenshot. Shoot one day at a time, in Outlook’s Day view. If the day runs off the bottom of the screen, press Ctrl and − a couple of times to shrink the page until it all fits — or take two or three shots and drop them in together.

A screenshot of the week grid cannot work, and it is worth knowing why: Outlook prints no time on the appointments in that view. The hours down the left edge are the only clock text in the picture, so there is nothing for us to read. The tool will tell you rather than guess.

From a CSV, if you have the desktop Outlook — the one with a File menu in the top-left. Go to File → Open & Export → Import/Export → Export to a file → Comma Separated Values → Calendar, choose the pilot week, and hand us the file. This is the most accurate route by far: exact times, exact subjects, and it asks once what each of your Outlook categories means.

Nothing is saved until you review the list. Anything that lands on time you have already logged is marked already logged and starts unticked, so importing a day twice cannot double it.

Blocks that were with students arrive without a category, on purpose. A calendar title cannot say whether an orientation was a room full of students, or one student and their report card — you know, so you answer the questions. Everything else keeps its best guess for you to check.

If something goes wrong

Wrong name chosen
Tell Dawn — a two-minute fix, and nothing is lost.
Your name is not listed
Choose "I'm not on this list" and type it in.
Anything else
Screenshot whatever is on screen, including any error message, and send it to Dawn. The message text is what makes it fixable.

What we need from you

This is a pilot, so the problems are the useful part. After a few days, tell Dawn:

  1. How long a normal day took to log, once you had the hang of it.
  2. Whether the five questions got you to the right category, and where they did not.
  3. Any activity or area you could not find a good home for.
  4. Anything that made you hesitate, even briefly. If it made you stop and think, it will stop everyone else too.