John Myers of Edsby (L) and Siva Harinath (R) of Microsoft show real time insights from educational data to ISTE 2018 attendees

It’s every teacher’s dream: a realtime window into everything the school district knows about a specific student they’re teaching, available the moment they need it.

As part of the main lecture series at ISTE 2018 in Chicago, Microsoft showed how its Power BI data visualization system is now enabling this vision inside the popular Edsby LMS for K-12 school districts.

John Myers of Edsby and Sivakumar Harinath of Microsoft demonstrated breakthrough new school district-level capabilities to an audience of 70 educators from across North America.

Why analytics are needed

The primary goal of every K-12 district is to see students learn, grow and succeed. Districts have countless data points for students, but vital records are often housed in various formats and across diverse systems, with no way to consolidate them.

And in K-12, the ones that would benefit most from student data—teachers—often can’t access it for student privacy reasons. It’s historically been hard to give teachers data on the kids they’re teaching at a given time, and ONLY data on those kids.

Microsoft’s Power BI is an innovative cloud-based analytics service that enables easy visualization and analysis of data with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding. For K-12 school districts, it is available embedded inside the cloud-based digital learning platform Edsby, winner of the 2017 SIIA CODiE award for Best Educational Data Solution.

Edsby interfaces with the school district’s systems, aggregates and consolidates data across the district and manages which schools and teachers get data on which students… relationships that have high stakes privacy implications as students and teachers come and go.

More information on Edsby’s analytics capabilities is available here.