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. 🙂 

[HilaryDowns]

So, what I've found is APIs depend on what your SIS allows. My current schools SIS does not work with APIs so I'm at an impasse of learning how. Ugh. 

[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/

[Smithviz]

thanks for the shout out, Laura. Looker has really upped the game recently making it a lot more user friendly with better design features. I've been doing more work around creating multi-tiered views of data such as a overall school view, cohort (class, grade) view, and individual student view. Schools seem to be very happy to be able to triangulate both internal and external assessment data with their SIS demographic data. 

[weinhag]

Your work is impressive! I checked out your website after reading Laura's shout-out. Any advice or suggestions on where to start with creating a simple Looker engine (this would be my first endeavor, although I have successfully piqued some district-level interest as well) that would be a powerful data tool for end-users? 
For additional context, I am an assistant principal at a middle school with approximately 1,100 students. I have worked closely with our building and district MTSS teams for the last six years. We utilize Educlimber as our data warehouse and Alma as our SIS. We have been seeking a dynamic tool to analyze and make real-time, data-informed decisions regarding Tier I and Tier II health and student- and cohort-specific interventions. 

Thanks!

[lauratilton]

@weinhag are you suggesting you might be looking to use Looker in addition to Looker Studio? I have not heard of many examples where K-12 schools are actually using Looker. @Smithviz I assume you're referring to Looker Studio when you say Looker, but do you know of any schools actually using Looker? 

[weinhag]

My apologies. We are exploring Looker Studio as the platform to mine our data. 

[Smithviz]

Yes, I was referring to Looker Studio. Looker isn't really applicable to K-12. At least, I don't think so. 

As far as getting started with Looker Studio, I'd suggest something easy, such as academic information or survey information. The most important thing is to make sure your data is structured the correct way. Think of a Google Form and what the data looks like coming in. Row-level data. That's what you need. Of course, there are some transformations that might be needed depending on the chart type, but this is a good start. I'm more than happy to hop on a call and have a chat. You can fill in the form on my website and I'll get back to you.