Tag: office 365

Microsoft PowerBI

Microsoft PowerBI is an excellent tool for use in presenting and analysing school data, allowing staff to explore and interact with data which traditionally may be locked away in complex and very flat spreadsheets.

Schools have access to a massive amount of data.   This includes information about each student, academic data from assessment and testing, or from professional judgments made by teachers.    Secondary schools will also have baseline data such as the Centre for evaluation and monitoring (CEM) MIDYIS or ALIS data.   You will have data on attendance and on where students have been acknowledged for their efforts, or where they have had to be warned regarding poor effort or behaviour.  The above only scratches the surface of the available data.   For me this has long been a challenge in that all of this data is usually in difficult to read spreadsheets, where without well developed skills in using excel for example, trends and patterns will not be easy to identify. Even with well developed spreadsheet skills, attempts to analyse and interpret will be time consuming.  In addition it is often extremely difficult to bring together data sets such as looking for possible links between academic data, behaviour, attendance, etc.

PowerBI allows you to take all of this data and start exploring it.    You can create reports which present the data in simple graphical form however allow for the data to be explored.    For example you might display the count of behaviour issues by gender.   Clicking on a given gender would then filter to this gender, thereby allowing you to see other graphs such as academic performance or attendance by the selected gender, but also still showing the full cohort average, thereby allowing you to see where a particular subset of students vary from the average.

The above example shows how PowerBI displays focus on a given subset of data within graphs.  The dark pink bars relate to the selected focus whereas the light pink show dark for the whole data set.

Clicking other graphs would then allow you to easily explore other subsets of the data.   You can create reports allowing filtering by SEN status, native language, gender, subject, year and any other fields for which you have data.

PowerBI also comes with its own analytics engine which will analyse your data and identify where subsets of your data deviate from the average.     It is clear Microsoft are continuing to develop this functionality as when I first used this it identified correlations which were obvious and therefore of little use however more recently when I have used the analytics it has identified some more useful correlations.   I suspect this area will be further developed over time bringing greater potential for how it could be used.

The one drawback with PowerBI at this point is licensing.    For free you can create your PowerBI reports for individual use or can share these as files for viewing in the Desktop application complete with full editing rights however the main potential as I see it is to centrally create PowerBI reports and share them via Sharepoint so that staff can access as and when required but without the ability to change the report and without the complexity of the desktop applications interface.   You basically present them with a web page of the data for staff to interact with and explore using the graphs and other visuals and filtering provided by the person who creates the report.   For this Microsoft are currently charging a per user per month cost.      Given the potential power which PowerBI could provide to schools my hope is that Microsoft will eventually reconsider this and make PowerBI more affordable for use by schools.

PowerBI for me is about putting school data in the hands of staff in a way that is quick and easily to interpret plus usable.   It is about being able to explore data by simply clicking on individual elements and about using the data we already capture more efficiently.    With carefully crafted reports, generated through discussion with staff, the time taken to manage and analyse school data can be reduced, yet staff can be empowered to know and use the available school data appropriately.   If you haven’t tried PowerBI with you school data I would recommend you give it a try.

 

Microsoft Stream

Stream is another of the many Microsoft Office 365 apps which are available.   Stream is basically a video streaming solution designed in a similar vain to Microsoft Teams in that Groups are created and within a group, various channels can be created.

I have recently started experimenting using Stream to host our user training videos for our IT Services department.   Stream allows me to easily upload the videos and then provide a description including hashtags so that users can easily find videos when they need them.    As such users can easily find the training videos which relate to Microsoft Teams, to our management information system or to other topics based on the tagging of each video.

Another little feature of Stream is that it automatically processes the audio from uploaded videos and creates subtitles.    This makes videos accessible for those who may have a hearing impairment.  This seems like an excellent idea however in my initial tests it wasn’t sufficiently accurate to be of use and in some cases managed to create some spectacularly confusing sentences.   Thankfully you can easily download the created subtitle files, correct them and then re-upload them thereby solving this issue.   I would also suspect it may work better for those without a (mild) Glasgow accent like myself, plus I also think with time the engine which processes the audio will only get better and more accurate.

Outside of our current experimentation with Stream I wonder about using it with students where they might create a school news programme which is shared video stream or they might create vlogs as part of a project.    The walled garden of Stream makes it ideal for these kinds of uses as students can share with their peers and staff with the content limited to those within the school rather than the wider internet.

Stream, currently, is a rather basic app however in terms of allowing you to upload and share video content, often all that is needed is a simple app.   Stream therefore fits nicely.

 

 

Microsoft Forms: Sharing access to form data

Was playing around with MS Forms yesterday when I came across a feature I wasn’t aware of.   Basically you can create a link which will allow others to access the a summary of responses to a particular from.    I have been looking for this functionality for a while as it is often useful to allow multiple people to be able to review responses without allowing them access to change the form.

To do this simply create your form then click the responses tab.    On the responses tab click the … icon to reveal the option to “Get a summary link”.

You will then see a dialogue complete with a link to share with those who you wish to be able to access the data.

Now the above is useful however I must admit I would prefer the ability to access the data as a spreadsheet as opposed to as a summary list.   It would also be better if forms could provide specific access rights on a user level as opposed to in a link.   This is a feature I would also like to see where you are providing collaborative access to a form.   Here you are also able to create a link only, rather than to assign individual user level access.   Hopefully Microsoft are working on this.   For now, however, if you want to share responses as a spreadsheet or if you need user level access control you will need to look at using Google forms instead.

G-suite, MS or Apple: Consistency or Variety?

At my school we have recently been working towards the implementation and roll out of Office 365 across the school and in doing so it has raised some interesting questions in relation to the various platforms and solutions which are available for use in the classroom.

Take for example this post, “Battle of the classrooms” which focuses on the Google, Apple and Microsoft Classroom solutions.    Each does something different although there are also similarities with quite clear similarities existing between Google and Microsoft’s offering.

Teachers may have a preference for one or other based on their previous experience or skills.   As such it seems sensible to allow them to make use of this experience and their associated skills in their teaching.    Some teachers may be adventurous, innovative and striving to try new things and therefore may identify new solutions and apps outside of the more common ones, then wanting to make use of these in their lessons.     The above is critical in terms of seeking innovative practice and learning experiences as it taps into teacher motivation, existing experience and skills.   This works from a micro, individual teacher and lesson viewpoint.

Taking the macro viewpoint however the above is problematic.    The students, who we are here to serve, experience the lessons from a number of different teachers and subjects during the week as they move around the school following their timetable.   They therefore expect to experience consistency as they move from lesson to lesson.   Thinking about it the education system is awash with requests for consistency including standardized testing and inspections.   The idea of different teachers using different technology solutions in their lessons seems to be at odds with this need for consistency.    Should individual teachers all be using differing platforms this could lead to confusion among students and could negatively impact on learning.

Compromise seems to be the only solution.   To adopt a core set of apps such as solutions for sharing revision content, which are consistently used by teachers across the school, while allowing teachers to experiment with different apps within their teaching.     Considering the compromise as a point on a continuum between a totally standardized environment, where a strict set of apps are allowed, and an environment where anything goes and any app can be used, I think I lean to the right of centre, towards encouraging and allowing flexibility in trying new apps.

Relecting on the above I realise that my starting point was that of the teacher and teaching.   I wonder if my end point may have been different if I had started by looking at the student side of things.   I will however leave that for a future post.

For now my belief in relation to edTech use continues to be in the need for flexibility and innovation albeit with some aspects of consistency if that contradiction is even possible?