Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Making a Student Lookup System

Over the Winter Break, I was possessed. I spent too much time analyzing the data for our Inclusion [Support] Team. I did one thing, then thought of another, and xxx hours later, I had an awesome thing. It was exactly what I needed. 

Then I broke it.

Now I am trying to recreate what I did and I cannot remember how I set up the formulas. I am going to try to keep notes here for the future.





In the Student Lookup, you would choose the section, or programme (PYP, MYP, DP), then that would filter the Grades in each section. The grade would then filter the student names in that specific grade. 

Below are the steps I took to make it on the dashboard page. 

  1. Get a UNIQUE list of students
  2. Find their Grades
  3. Count the number of academic vs behavioral concerns
  4. Find the student section - =INDEX(FILTER('sheeetname!$C$2:$C, 'Form Responses 1'!$E$2:$E = B5), 1)
  5. Find the concerns  - =SPLIT(TEXTJOIN(",", TRUE, UNIQUE('sheetname'!J2:J)), ",")
  6. Flatten the row =TRANSPOSE(UNIQUE(FILTER('sheetname'!J2:J, 'sheetname!J2:J<>"")))

This is the backend. 

I made a column with the sections, PYP, MYP, DP. I then used this formula in the next column, the middle column above, 

=SORT(UNIQUE(FILTER(C3:C, SEARCH('sheetname'!C25, B3:B) > 0)), 1, TRUE)

And then the third row:

=IFERROR(SORT(FILTER(D3:D, C3:C='sheetname'!D25)), {})


When I looked at it, I thought maybe individual students is not as good as showing a whole class. This could be useful for specialist teachers as well as subs, so I adjusted the above formula to stop at the grade level and I got the below output:





Sunday, February 4, 2024

Creating a Student Lookup in Google Sheets

The idea of a student lookup system has been rattling around in my head for a few years. I started this in Google Data Studio, but Data Studio started changing and I couldn't keep up. Data Studio became Looker and now four years later, it looks completely different than it did.

I have been playing with Google Sheets for a few years, and when I came to our Sheet with PYP student data, I could see that some of the data, like reading levels, was something that was outdated for most students on one sheet, but on another was kept up-to-date (EAL).


The original sheet

I started with the reading data and found that I could use VLOOKUP to connect the above sheet to the EAL sheet. The formula I used pulled the reading data from the EAL sheet and keeping our sheet updated. I also started looking for other pieces of information I could keep updated with a formula. 

This got the ideas flowing and I put my homeroom teacher hat on. I wondered what I would want to see as a homeroom teacher for a student. 

I started with a student name that would bring up strategies and goals for a student.



This was good, but then I wanted to expand it to filter between PYP, MYP, and DP. Then I wanted to know other information about the student like the number of submissions they had, reading level, language phase for MYP/DP, and a link to their support plan. I came up with this:

The updated sheet

I can see that I am not done with this - I would like to add the current number of absences, EAL goals and strategies, and something else that slipped my mind, but it is a start. 

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Visualizing Student Support Data with Google Sheets

 In the beginning

I joined the [formerly-called] SEN team last year. The team was using anecdotal records for their data collection. The issue was that it was kind of a black box -immediately I wondered how I would know if the strategies I was using with students in my care were helping them reach their goals.

Last year, I helped the team reimagine some ways to collect data on student behavior through the use of rubrics, checklists, and goal trackers. We also had teachers write anecdotal notes about students while observing their behavior.

This year, the school created a new position, inclusion support coordinator. The first thing she did when she came in was to ask how we could collect data from teachers more easily. I was elated to hear this and suggested we use a Google Form that could be easily bookmarked to the browser, so that's what we did. She pushed teachers to use it when they suspected academic or behavioral issues with students. We also did away with the former ways of collecting data to try to save teachers' time.

The form responses before visualization.

With the data collected from the Form, we started by filtering the responses into the different programs; PYP, MYP, and DP. This was good, but after a month, we could see that it was hard to read. I also started asking my coordinator and principals what kind of data they look at when viewing it, and I started thinking about how to take their feedback, what I knew about what I would want to see as a homeroom teacher, and I started thinking of how. I could make this all visual. 

In my head, we would see the current weeks' totals along with the top five students. I also had this idea of a student lookup in my head.

The idea I had brewing in my head was a Google Form that could be easily bookmarked. In my head, we would collate the responses, and these would become the updated form question responses.

I had this other idea that we would have a lookup of student with the goals and the support plan. 

My demo of a student lookup 

Over winter break, as I spent the days at my in-laws house, I got to work making a dashboard. 

For this dashboard, I wanted a few things, data visualization, simple, more data, and better visualizations - right now, there's a lot of text.

Going forward, this exercise should show that data needs to be consolidated and accessible. 

Here's what it looks like.



Then I broke it. I committed the cardinal sin of editing the response sheet. After editing the response sheet, it no longer connected with the dashboard I made. 

The good thing is that I have a better idea of what I want to do next year.