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.
Why yes, I did go wireless during my session
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 ☹.
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 ☹.
These take forever to grade
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.
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 Major/Minor Scales
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.
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.
The app has been well received by my students
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.
Didn't grade a single one. Power Bi did.
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.
My 4th gen iPads are still little workhorses
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.
Assessment #2! Creating 10 randomly generated Intervals
Sometimes you need a reference
Creating Intervals Power Bi data. I'm gonna need to spend some time revisiting this skill
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.
So glad I finally figured out how to create a Report Tooltip in Power Bi
I think I have a new EdTech conference session I need to start submitting during the proposal process: PowerApps, Power Bi, and Pedagogy
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