Ideas and Inspiration: Using Looker Studio in Education

[sabrinasteig]

Hi everyone,

I’m relatively new to Looker Studio, and I’m exploring how this tool can be effectively used in educational settings. My role involves supporting administrators and educators in creating meaningful professional development opportunities and leveraging data to drive decision-making.

I’d love to hear how others have used Looker Studio in education, whether as an administrator or educator. Specifically:

• Have you used it to track or visualize data like student performance, library circulation, or other school metrics?
• How has it impacted decision-making or communication in your school or district?
• Do you have any tips for integrating Looker Studio into professional development or classroom instruction?

[lauratilton]

Hi Sabrina,

I've been using Looker Studio (previously Data Studio) in K-12 education for the past 7 years. I was initially working as a district administrator building tools for visualizing assessment results, survey data, professional development programs and other district metrics. Having a common set of reports and language to use with teachers and administrators was critical to decision-making and communication. Data became more of a tool and less of a "gotcha" which is what it seems to be in many school districts. 

In my current role (Senior K-12 Data Analytics Specialist) with Five Star Technology Solutions, I work with schools and districts to build dashboards related to assessments, professional development, surveys, Chromebook usage, attendance, and educator evaluation, many of which utilize Looker Studio, BQ, and other Google tools. Looker Studio has incredible potential and we continue to find new ways to address challenges in K-12 through data visualization and data professional development.

I do have a blog (now somewhat inactive, but still useful) with a large number of examples and posts related to K-12 data visualization with Looker Studio. You can also check out what we are up to in the Data Analytics division at Five Star.

Hope that's helpful. Looker Studio is a fabulous tool and you will have an amazing time learning more and coming up with new ideas!

Laura Tilton

[HilaryDowns]

I'd love to know what resources you used to learn more about lookerstudio? I've made a bunch of dashboards for my schools but I want to level up my expertise but all I find are for ecommerce which doesn't really help that much. I've done Chris' course as well. 

[HilaryDowns]

That's great. Thanks. I'll look into them. I'm wanting to learn about APIs that will connect to SIS's automatically so I don't have to keep updating manually. For now, I do them weekly and have a pretty good system down but it would be nice to not have to do them. 🙂

[weinhag]

Hilary,

I am just starting to dig into LookerStudio for our MTSS framework and Student Service meetings. I am curious if you've made any headway with API integration? I haven't built the platform in Looker Studio as I am trying to determine if it is indeed possible to update daily via APIs. 

[HilaryDowns]

Hi, I have not yet but it is on my to-do list to learn in a couple of weeks. I'll circle back to this and let you know my insights. 🙂 

[lauratilton]

Honestly, the best way to learn is just to DO, and be creative along the way! You'll need to figure out how to take the information that's out there for ecommerce and apply it to your use case once you get the basics down. I'm lucky in that my full-time job now focuses on building data tools for schools so I've had lots of opportunities to learn. My vote for a "level up" is to learn about parameters (if you haven't already). Here's a very basic post I wrote a few years ago that may help you get started.

[HilaryDowns]

Thank you Laura. 😉

[lauratilton]

You'll also want to check out Chris Smith's work...he's done some pretty amazing stuff with Looker Studio and offers online courses for educators who want to learn more about this tool.

https://smithvisualizations.com/projects/