What it does
As Written is a Google Workspace web application. A teacher signs in with their school Google account and, at the end of a class, confirms the day’s record.
Three steps, every day:
- Your district’s own accommodation list is the vocabulary. Your district keeps one Google Sheet listing the accommodation categories in use across the district. As Written documents against that list. It does not come with a vendor’s list, and it does not substitute one.
- Each student’s plan is set up once. Which accommodations are on that student’s plan, and the expected code for a normal day, an assessment day, and a state-testing day.
- Each day, the teacher reviews and submits. As Written proposes the day’s codes from each student’s own plan, the teacher changes whatever was different, and the record is written — one row per student per day, into a Google Sheet.
The codes are the ones your staff already use: used · available but not needed · offered and declined · not applicable · weather · absent.
Where the records live
In the teacher’s own Google Drive. Not in ours.
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is unusual and it is checkable.
As Written runs inside Google Workspace as the signed-in teacher. The spreadsheet holding a class’s records is created in that teacher’s own Drive, under your district’s Google Workspace, subject to your retention, sharing, audit and eDiscovery policies.
What follows from that:
- We have no access to any file containing a student’s name. Not read access, not administrative access. None.
- Your district’s own two files — your accommodation list and your coverage dashboard — are created by you, in your Drive, from templates we provide. You own them from the moment you create them. We are not given access to those either.
- If you stop using As Written, your records stay. They are Google Sheets in your own Drive, readable without the application and without us. There is nothing to export, no lock-out, and no data of yours for anyone to hold.
- There is nothing to transmit. The application makes no outbound network request of any kind. No analytics, no telemetry, no third-party service, no web fonts. Student data does not leave Google’s infrastructure, because there is no mechanism in the application by which it could.
- It sends no email, ever.
A note for whoever reviews the permissions
When a teacher signs in, Google’s permission screen says the application can “See, edit, create, and delete all your Google Sheets spreadsheets.” That wording is Google’s, it describes the permission rather than this application, and we cannot change it.
The application only ever opens three kinds of spreadsheet — the teacher’s own class sheets, your accommodation list and your dashboard — and it has no way to browse, search or list a Drive. The Privacy Policy explains each permission and why the narrower one was chosen wherever Google offered a choice.
Read the full Privacy Policy › — every category of data the application touches, where each is stored, and who owns that location, including the places where the answer is not simply “the teacher”.
What a district can see
A building lead or special education director needs coverage information without opening a file full of student names. That is the only thing As Written reports upward, and it carries no student data at all.
Where a district switches it on, As Written maintains one summary row per teacher per class in a spreadsheet your district owns: the teacher’s email address, their building, the class label, how many students are on that roster, when they last documented, and how many days they have documented.
Three things we say about it up front, rather than when asked:
- It is off unless your district asks us to turn it on. Off is the default.
- It records teacher activity. How many days a teacher documented is information about that teacher’s work, and a district adopting this should expect to discuss it with staff — and, where applicable, with their association. We would rather you have that conversation before rollout than discover the feature afterward. It is written plainly in the Privacy Policy for exactly that reason.
- No student data is written to it. This is enforced in the code, not merely intended: a validation check refuses the entire row if anything in it looks like a student name, an email address other than the teacher’s own, or a value of the wrong shape.
“So your software auto-fills compliance records.”
Someone will ask this, and they should. A record nobody reviewed is a risk whether it is on paper or on a screen — and a false record is worse than a missing one, because a blank cell claims nothing while a wrong code claims something untrue.
The honest answer:
As Written pre-fills from each student’s own plan, and the teacher corrects the exceptions before submitting. That is a review step, not an autopilot.
Three things make it one:
- The defaults are day-type aware. An accommodation that applies only to assessments defaults to not applicable on an ordinary day. The application does not claim extended time was used on a day with no assessment.
- The defaults come from your district’s own list and the student’s own plan, not from a vendor’s guess about what a student probably needs.
- The teacher can read what each accommodation is while reviewing it. The review screen names every accommodation in full rather than showing a number the teacher would have to remember. A teacher reviewing a number they have to look up was not reviewing.
What it is not
- Not a system of record we hold on your behalf. You hold your records.
- Not legal or special-education advice, and not a judgment about whether a plan has been met.
- Not a replacement for the teacher’s or the case manager’s professional judgment.
- Not a student-facing tool. Students do not sign in to it, use it, or get contacted by it.
- Not a data privacy agreement. Districts that require a vendor DPA or a FERPA school-official designation should ask us; we expect to sign one on your template.
Availability
As Written is in a limited pilot and is not generally available.
We are not publishing pilot results. There are none yet worth publishing: the measurement runs across two school-year windows and nothing will be claimed from it before both are complete. When there is a number, it will come with its sample size, what it does not cover, and what would have counted as the pilot failing.
If you are a district and want to talk about a pilot, write to support@aswritten.app.