data coaching, data informed, data literacy, data studio, education, teachers

Give Teachers Access to the Data They Need

Google Data Studio for the win!

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of work with data visualization through the use of Google Data Studio. I love Data Studio, or DS, or GDS, because it syncs very quickly with Google Sheets, a csv file, or tons of other connectors. GDS is mainly used by people dealing with marketing or web traffic. However, it is not just limited to that genre of users.

In education GDS is a great way to share information with teachers, parents, administrators and other stakeholders within the school or district. The nice thing about GDS is the ability to allow users to adjust data through filters. This allows people to search and find answers to questions they have about the data. Our teachers love the ability to narrow down to a certain group of students or to filter and quickly find students from a particular reading level or score range on an assessment.

Adjusting data through filters in #datastudio allows educators the ability to quickly find answers to questions about their students.

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Locking down data in GDS

GDS also allows you to set up your data in a way so that if you have an email address associated with a row of data, when a person logs on, they will only see information associated with their email address. This is great for privacy or when you want to narrow down information that someone can access.

One downside to this is that you can only use one email address per row of data. That’s right. If you have a classroom teacher’s email address for a student, that’s great. That classroom teacher can log in and see the information. However, if there is a co-teacher, or counselor, or principal, those people would not be able to see the data.

A better way to share specific information in GDS

The work around is through something called blended data. You can set up a blended data source and combine email addresses with a single data set. The downside is that you are limited to only 10 fields of data. If you have more than 10 fields, you’ll need to create several blended data sets. No thank you.

Thanks to the great work by Pablo Felip @pfelipm, you can now set up multiple email filtering without having to blend data! This has been an absolute game changer for my work. It is a bit complicated to type out the actual how-to for this, so I created a video that will walk you through the process.

If you would prefer to read about it, you can check out Pablo’s in-depth blog post here.

Chris

Chris Smith is an academic data analyst in the international education field. Throughout his 25 years in education, he noticed schools and educators collecting data but struggling with being overwhelmed or not knowing what to do with the data. So, he began coaching, training, and consulting schools and educators to learn how to discover what data they actually need and how they can turn it into information that leads to insights and informed decision-making.

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