Self learning - Google Data Studio #1

If you know me at all, you are well aware of my love and passion for spreadsheets. Colour coding, formulas, graphs, pivot tables... You name it! But if you know me, you also know that I love a good challenge. I just simply cannot stay still. My brain needs to always be working in the background, one way or another. With New Zealand being back into lockdown, I've had to find new ways to keep myself busy and entertained.🧠

Everyone knows how much I love spreadsheets and pretty graphs, but I felt like I needed a new challenge to keep me entertained over this new lockdown. I had been thinking about using Google Data Studio for a while now, but I did not find enough time to give it a go.

With the country's swift move back to alert level 4, the students in room 2 and I have been working hard on our distance learning programme. Not all my students have access to their own devices, so I've been using google forms to try and keep most of my students engaged and get them to share their learning without always needing them to ask their parents to email me their work. It's been working really well, especially our reading log, but I didn't feel super happy with what sharing looked like given that I was the only person having access to that data...

As much as I love a good spreadsheet, my year 2 students really don't - which is why I wanted to create something different that they could access too. So I made the most of being stuck at home: I started teaching myself how to use Google Data Studio, and I figured out a way to display the data that I have been collecting with our class reading log.

I love the final result because it visually appealing to students, and also (let's be honest!) mostly because it will update itself automatically every time one of my students fills in our reading log.

Look at this, how cool!

I mean, it is still very much a work of progress. I would love to be able to add a filter for us to pick which Room 2's book review we want to read, but I haven't gotten that figured out quite yet. This should keep me busy over this lockdown! 🤭

My students' favourite feature is the 'most recent book review', which they can see changing quite frequently throughout the day as more people fill in the form.

I can really feel myself falling in love with this tool already. I might be slightly obsessed, but I do feel like the possibilities are only limited by one's creativity and immagination. If you're already confident using Google Sheets, I would highly recommend giving it a go.

Next steps:

• I'll be creating more of these to showcase our learning, but I'm wondering if anyone else out there uses Data Studio to display their students' learning journeys?
• I am SO looking forward to attending a toolkit on Google Data Studio with Dave walker this Wednesday evening to find out more about this tool. Stay tuned...