​Empowerment has been a popular EDU buzzword for quite sometime now. Usually when I see it in my twitter feed, the term is being used in conjunction with "students"; "Empower students to do X with Y". Empowerment isn't a word I use loosely because of it's #EDU buzzy-ness, but I couldn't help myself using "empowerment" days ago while presenting at the 2019 CETPA (now CITE!) conference.

​My session wasn't focused on empowering my students through, it was showing the empowering capabilities of PowerApps. I've been using PowerApps in my music classroom for over a year now, and like other EdTech tools I've adopted over the years into my pedagogy (Surface, Miracast, OneNote, Power Bi), I can't see myself teaching day to day without it.

I was fortunate to have the expertise of Brian Dang (@8bitclassroom) on hand for my presentation. Without his help a couple summers ago, I'd still be using  less efficient methods to track my inventory and student achievement.

​With PowerApps, I have applications for assigning, tracking, and turning in my classroom inventory with my 240 students. This includes 160+ shared band and orchestra instruments, 250+ method books, instrument accessories, and 300+ classroom iPads. This is nothing new for a music teacher, it's just a part of the job. My previous methods included pencil/paper or a spreadsheet, but that was tedious, cumbersome, and ate up a lot of my prep and class time. There is probably some 3rd party inventory tracking service I could pay for, but I don't have the ca$h for that. With PowerApps, I was able to create my own custom inventory applications, designed to my liking that captured the specific data points I needed. It's a WIWIWIG (What I Want Is What I Get) platform. Sure, you can argue that every dev platform is like that, but the PowerApps Low-Code learning curve is so much easier for my busy teacher/husband/father lifestyle. 

I teach my middle school students Music Theory. Short answer: Music Notation is brand new language and ya gotta hit all 4 domains of language acquisition. Just say'n. Resources for practicing and reinforcing the concepts and skills I teach my students are limited, and will cost me more money to get more. I have my lessons and worksheets for students to practice on, but having to recycle them with my students I see for 3 years just feels bad. My 8th graders will get a worksheet they completed in 6th and 7th grade and that's because that's all I have ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Sorry not sorry, and I'm not going to TPT to buy a some worksheets that are lacking the rigor I'm looking for. ​

However, since last school year I've been transferring my students' skill/concept practice of music theory over to an application I created in PowerApps. So far I have identifying/creating notes, building scales, and creating intervals. I shared my app to my students via my school's Office 365 tenant, so they just login to the PowerApps app like anything else in 365 and have at it. PowerApps runs on all devices plus the browser, so iPad, phone, whatever, it works. There are so many benefits to what's happening now I have to show you a list:

💯 My students have unlimited practice now. In class or at home. Regarding home, I don't assign them to use my app, they just do it themselves at night and over breaks. That's a win for me 😁

​💯 No more paper and trips to the copy room!

💯 The practice activity questions are randomized, so my students are never answering the same stuff as the student next to them. "Hey, what did you get for the third one?" does not work in my class. Now my students are working together, helping each other, and teaching each other how to get the correct answers.

💯 All the data being collected (student answers) live in my school's Office 365 tenant, not some other 3rd party service.

💯 Speaking of data, since PowerApps is WIWIWIG, I design the app activities to capture the data points I'm looking for. Students struggling more with Bass Clef? Ledger Lines? Tri-Tones? Leading Tones? I can see all that because I designed the data output.

💯 Student.Work.Is.Automatically.Graded.

💯 All the data get pumped into Power Bi so I can see how successful my students are doing. I can see trends over time, hotspots in my seating arrangements, and common issues.

💯 All the data is anonymized and shared back with my students to my liking.

I like to use rubrics now since I jumped on the grading-for-mastery bandwagon. This takes more time rather than marking stuff correct/incorrect and coming up with a percentage. Speaking of time, grading my 240+ students takes about….forever. Usually I'm trying to get through grading their work so fast that I don't spend the time needed to keep track of the issues I'm seeing. There are other 3rd party rubric tools out there I could use, but nothing I've seen fits my rubric-ing style, so I made my own rubric scoring tool in PowerApps.

​My rubric app adapts to the domain I'm grading. If I'm looking at my students' written work, I choose  "Writing" in my dropdown, and now all my mastery standards change on the apps' screen. Each standard also has a list/combo box picker of common issues I can select from as I'm grading their work. So, I look at my student's work, I move the slider to give them points for that standard, I select the issues I'm seeing, then hit save. Easy-Peasy. If I'm scoring a performance activity, I just switch the domain to "Performance" and my app adjusts all the mastery standards and coinciding issues to reflect it. All the data gets saved to me, I pump it into Power Bi for analysis, and I can export/import scores into my LMS.

​I'm at the point now where I can build an app in a weekend to use during the next school week. It's really that easy, and the PowerApps team is working to make the learning curve easier all the time. Do a search on YouTube and you'll find all sorts of people in the PowerApps community making videos to teach and help you out. Follow the #PowerAddicts hashtag on twitter and you'll find a wonderful community of insightful people willing to lend their expertise. PowerApps has empowered me, allowing me to create the apps I need to work more efficiently, improve my pedagogy, and get more insight on my students' learning and progress. 

Recently I was at the TCEA Educational Technology conference in Texas. I was there with the assistance of the MIE Expert program to present my  session on using Power Bi for student data analysis. This is my 5th time presenting this session; I've also presented the same topic at 2017 Fall CUE, 2018 NCCE, 2018 Spring CUE, and 2018 CETPA. Every time my session changes a little bit because the data has changed and I have more examples of actionable pedagogy based on the data. However, this time at TCEA there was a much bigger difference, and it wasn't related to me. I was one of 3 Power Bi sessions at this conference! Three! I'm used to being the only Power Bi anything at conferences I attend, so this was a pleasant surprise to see. I've been raising as much Power Bi awareness as I can for the past few years, and it seems like now we're moving into the early-adopter phase of this educational innovation. 

I got to be honest though, as much as I love using Power Bi, PowerApps has recently been hogging my free-time attention. I've blogged about creating apps to help alleviate the complications of my classroom inventory management, but lately I've been developing for pedagogy. I teach a lot of music theory in my classes (by "a lot", I mean more than the typical middle school classroom). By the time my students head off to High School, my 8th graders can create Intervals, Triads, Scales, and can use all that knowledge to create polyphonic music using both relative Major and Minor scales. When it comes to teaching all this theory pedagogy, I have OneNote Class Notebook and StaffPad to create custom assessment exercises, or I can use other assessments I have from Finale or Alfred. This is good practice for my students, but it is A LOT of grading on my end.

Just the other day my students were working on an Interval worksheet (identification) with 24 different Intervals on the paper. I have 100 students completing this work, so that's 2,400 Intervals I have to grade for one assignment on one day. Sigh.... So, for a few hours at night I have to go through each worksheet, quickly scanning over them just to see if my students' identified each Interval correctly, the do the math and give them a grade. Alternatively, I could get a couple students to grade them for me (I don't do this 😉). Regardless, because in both instances I'm trying to quickly get through this tedious grading exercise, I probably don't spend enough time looking at my students' answers to do some analysis and find out WHY my students are getting wrong answers. Is it because they didn't count the lines and spaces of the music staff correctly, or did they miscount the half steps between the two notes? Are these careless mistakes, or is there a trend going on? Figuring that out takes even more time ☹. ​

But, now I have PowerApps 😁
 
Over winter break I started brainstorming in my head how I could create music theory activities in PowerApps, and not for stuff low on Bloom's totem pole like identification, I'm talking about creating. That's really what we want our students to do with the knowledge and skills we teach them. "I've taught you, now go prove you understand by creating something!" Working on previous PowerApps, I gained  some understanding of using variables which really helped out in the design process of the music theory activities. It also really helps  that music notation has a bunch of math going on based on note placement and value too. I could create an assessment activity where my students manipulate music notes, submit an answer, and I get to collect all the assessment data I want (because I'm the designer and I know what information I want from my students' answers 😉), and then dump all that data into Power Bi for automatic grading and analysis. Did you read that? Automatic grading and analysis. So I got to work, and within a few days I had my first assessment activity for my students.

​My first assessment related to what my 7th/8th grade students were currently learning back in January; creating Major and Minor scales given a tonic note and using the Half Step/Whole Step formula related to both modes. This activity reinforces their knowledge of Treble and Bass Clef notes, Half and Whole Steps, Enharmonics, basic Intervals, lays the groundwork for establishing a Key for a piece of music, and also helps to explain the whole reason for a Key Signature. Normally this is done through paper and pencil activities, and also takes forever to grade.

Creating the app was fairly straight forward. Create a music staff, clef sign, and a whole note for my students to manipulate. PowerApps doesn’t support drag n drop, so I created a control for the first whole note. Using the control a student could raise/lower the note and add a sharp/flat/natural. When that was complete and ready to duplicate 7 more times, I realized my setup would be too excessive. Instead of having a control for each note, I wanted one control that could manipulate each of the 8 notes, depending on which one was selected. I used context variables to make this happen. After my 8 notes and control were set, I had to figure out the instructional design process of:

1) Teacher assigns scale
2) Student sees assigned scale, creates scale, and submits scale
3) Student no longer see assigned scale because it has been turned in.

To figure this out I used some knowledge I recently gained on creating star-schema data models. Each assigned scale would have a primary key in one data table, and on a separate table my students' submissions would include a primary key (created on their submission). If a match existed, that scale was "turned in" and wouldn't show up on the screen anymore. Cool stuff.

​I took a couple days to beta test the app/activity with my students and get feedback. They used their classroom iPads, running the app through the PowerApps mobile app or in the web browser. We discussed what worked, what didn't, and how could it be better? Overall the feedback was positive and I made some changes to the submission process to avoid accidental submissions by the students. The good news is since all my data was going into Power Bi, I could filter out those beta testing days so they wouldn't count towards the students' assessment score. Speaking of Power Bi, that was the last step in this process. Now that my student answer data was coming in, I needed to create my algorithms to get the insight I wanted and organize the data in a meaningful way for my students and me.

​Numbers don't lie, and that's what we saw. Some students had trouble with their clef signs, some were struggling with the basic ascending intervals of the notes, and others weren't counting their Half Steps between the notes correctly. When students saw this information in Power Bi on their end, they were able to filter out their answers to see how they were doing and what mistakes they were making. We had some good conversations in class reviewing the knowledge and skills they needed to successfully complete the scale creation activity, and as the data shows, they've gotten better over time. And yes, creating this whole setup took hours, hours that I could've spent grading paper and pencil worksheets, but now that I've got a super time-saving resource that challenges my students' learning, automatically grades, gives us the insight we need, eliminates photocopies, and I can reuse it now whenever I want.

​It hasn't ended too. This past week my students used my new music theory PowerApp to complete another activity, creating Intervals. Not basic ones, but Major, Minor, and Perfect Intervals. For this activity, I didn't want my students to be working on the same Interval at the same time because we sit close to each other and they have wandering eyes. Using a timer control and the Rand() function a few times, I created an algorithm that would create 10 random intervals for my students to complete. My students navigate to the correct screen, hit the button, and now have 10 Intervals to create that don't match anyone else in the classroom. The intervals differ in Clef Sign, Direction, Root Note, Accidental, and Interval. Students' answers get dumped into Power Bi, and now we can see more than just if they got it right/wrong, but what mistakes did they make to get it wrong. Once again, cool stuff.

​So far my students have submitted 723 scales and 1367 Intervals that I didn't have to hand grade. They're better at Scales than Intervals, and I know which students I need to revisit concepts with so they can successfully create these digital music theory artifacts. Future steps include a Creating Major/Minor Triads screen, and a Creating Treble/Bass Clef notes screen for my beginner students. I also need to create a method for my students to track their music theory mastery based on the numbers they're getting in Power Bi. This is related to Sonny Magana's T3 framework, and will probably involve my students using Excel 😁. In some good news I also just figured out (finally!) how to create a Report Tooltip in Power Bi, so my students can get the personalized (and anonymous) data about their progress faster.

​I think I have a new EdTech conference session I need to start submitting during the proposal process: PowerApps, Power Bi, and Pedagogy