The Algebra Teacher Powers to B.I.

It is time for another update on my Power BI Journey which you will soon see has taken a few turns.  Before I go any further, I cannot go another minute without thanking a few special people who have supported me along the way. 1. My wife.   I want to thank my wife for giving me extra time at night and on the weekends to learn, study, and prepare for the demonstrations that I would be delivering.  She even lets me practice! Mollie definitely had no idea she would be unofficially enrolled in so many Power BI classes, haha.  She is a great student who gives me fantastic feedback that I then use when trying to make my demonstrations better. 2. My incredible bosses .  Brian and Devin Knight always provide support daily.  They know how overwhelming it can be to take a deep dive into material that you have never worked with before.  They have been there every step of the way to answer my questions no matter how trivial they may be.  It is a stark contr...

You're probably wondering about that title, huh? Just stay with me.  We all edit our interactions with the people we meet, right? Or sometimes WISH we could go back and edit some of our past interactions! And not just with people we first meet, but people we have known all our lives. There are so many exchanges I wish I could rewind to, filter out an unfortunate reaction or 2 of mine, and then hit “play” again. But I guess that comes with age - - that realization that certain exchanges or unsolicited advice should be taken with a grain of salt, but others should be cared for and cherished because they are more precious than gold.   My mother-in-law calls those “Rocking Chair Memories” -- experiences and visuals in our minds that we can close our eyes and return to once our bodies are not quite as spry as they once were. I am learning to edit my life… I want to make sure I have enough of those memories saved up for my rocking years. Cue Dolly Parton’s “Rockin’Years” classi...

If there is anything constant in the world at this time, it is that you will get an update to your Power BI desktop once a month.  If you are running low on time and want a quick video summary of June’s updates, then you are in the right spot. This video covers all the new updates, but one of my favorite features is being able to add the visual data points to a line chart.   Yeah, I know that might not be the most exciting thing, but coming from a math background and teaching my kids how to graph line charts -- I missed the absence of the dots.  I mean really, how else could we make a line chart before computers without the dots? I hope you enjoy it.

Last week in my blog and video I discussed how Power BI could have made my life as a teacher much easier.  It is not that Power BI can do things that I could not on my own.  It is the fact that Power BI could have saved me so much time.   This led me to some thoughts and questions.   How could I have impacted the students more in the classroom with this extra time?  Would teachers who were not analyzing student data due to time constraints now start?  How can I make the data tell my students a story that gives them an accurate picture of their progress?   That last question is what leads to this week’s blog.   Many times the metrics (which is just a fancy word for "numbers") of what we want to show are easy to do by hand with a basic math background.  Although easy, it can be very time consuming when dealing with different groups of data: like 6 periods of students instead of 1 period. When we want to do these calculations quickl...