“It's important that students engage in the process of designing digital platforms and tools as a means to generate robust solutions to problems that matter.”
That's from Sonny Magana's recent book Disruptive Classroom Technologies: A Framework for Innovation in Education. It relates to the 3rd tier of his T3 Framework: Transcendent Technology Use, where he discusses how technology can be used in the classroom for the meaningful application of inquiry design and social entrepreneurship.
It's been 5 years since the launch of Code.org and the Hour of Code movement, and we just finished celebrating Computer Science Education Week. Two of my beginning music classes did their Hour of Code activity, while two more are waiting until after their upcoming concert this Thursday. Every year I poll my 6th graders; "Who has already done Hour of Code before?" and every year more and more students are raising their hands. It's wonderful to see that after these five years more teachers are aware of HOC and are making time for their students to participate in the activity. By now a lot of us know how important computational thinking and computer science concepts are for students, and that getting their hands dirty on the keyboard doing coding activities is a great experience for their CS learning. But what happens after that? According to Magana, students should use the available coding platform resources and new skills to solve "Wicked Problems," and I agree. Don't just make something, make something that's useful to you.
What about teachers though? Here we are, stewards of Computer Science Education Week and Hour of Code, promoting its importance and creating clubs at our schools, but what do we do as we also acquire these same skills and understandings of computer science? I'm in my 15th year in the classroom, and I've seen many "Wicked Problems" inside and outside of the classroom that affect my pedagogy and work efficiency. As a teacher and CS advocate, I'm supposed to design and provide the right environment so "students engage in the process of designing digital platforms and tools as a means to generate robust solutions to problems that matter", but what about me? Can I “engage in the process of designing digital platforms and tools as a means to generate robust solutions to problems that matter” to me? As more and more educators learn CS concepts and skills and realize the potential of what they are capable of creating, where can they go to take an idea from their head and code it into a functional application curated for their professional needs?
That's from Sonny Magana's recent book Disruptive Classroom Technologies: A Framework for Innovation in Education. It relates to the 3rd tier of his T3 Framework: Transcendent Technology Use, where he discusses how technology can be used in the classroom for the meaningful application of inquiry design and social entrepreneurship.
It's been 5 years since the launch of Code.org and the Hour of Code movement, and we just finished celebrating Computer Science Education Week. Two of my beginning music classes did their Hour of Code activity, while two more are waiting until after their upcoming concert this Thursday. Every year I poll my 6th graders; "Who has already done Hour of Code before?" and every year more and more students are raising their hands. It's wonderful to see that after these five years more teachers are aware of HOC and are making time for their students to participate in the activity. By now a lot of us know how important computational thinking and computer science concepts are for students, and that getting their hands dirty on the keyboard doing coding activities is a great experience for their CS learning. But what happens after that? According to Magana, students should use the available coding platform resources and new skills to solve "Wicked Problems," and I agree. Don't just make something, make something that's useful to you.
What about teachers though? Here we are, stewards of Computer Science Education Week and Hour of Code, promoting its importance and creating clubs at our schools, but what do we do as we also acquire these same skills and understandings of computer science? I'm in my 15th year in the classroom, and I've seen many "Wicked Problems" inside and outside of the classroom that affect my pedagogy and work efficiency. As a teacher and CS advocate, I'm supposed to design and provide the right environment so "students engage in the process of designing digital platforms and tools as a means to generate robust solutions to problems that matter", but what about me? Can I “engage in the process of designing digital platforms and tools as a means to generate robust solutions to problems that matter” to me? As more and more educators learn CS concepts and skills and realize the potential of what they are capable of creating, where can they go to take an idea from their head and code it into a functional application curated for their professional needs?
PowerApps
Last summer I met Brian Dang at his UCI PowerApps Hackathon. He's a former teacher who now works at Microsoft in the PowerApps wing of Office 365 Power Platform Apps. I had been following the development of PowerApps for a couple years, spending free time during the summer reading up on its documentation and messing around in the platform. However, in all of my studying I was never able to figure out how to write data to a data source in the platform. I already had experience designing and creating applications from my master’s degree at CSULB, so I already knew how to design and create a user interface with all the available controls, but I just couldn't figure out that pesky Patch function on my own. Brian helped me, explaining and showing me how patching and context variables work, and the flood gates in my brain began to open. I've had application ideas stuck in my head for a while, ideas that would solve my pedagogically-wicked problems, and now PowerApps was going to let me code them into reality.
PowerApps, along with Power Bi and Flow are a part of the Office 365 license my school district provides to me. It’s a "Low Code" application development platform that runs in the browser and utilizes resources available in Office 365 like SharePoint lists, Excel file tables, Flow recipes, the Active Directory, but can also connect to other third-party resources (like your SIS 😉). In the past I've written about my experience using Power Bi for student data analysis. PowerApps is the other side of that big picture. I’m using it to create applications for classroom student data collection.
PowerApps, along with Power Bi and Flow are a part of the Office 365 license my school district provides to me. It’s a "Low Code" application development platform that runs in the browser and utilizes resources available in Office 365 like SharePoint lists, Excel file tables, Flow recipes, the Active Directory, but can also connect to other third-party resources (like your SIS 😉). In the past I've written about my experience using Power Bi for student data analysis. PowerApps is the other side of that big picture. I’m using it to create applications for classroom student data collection.
The first two I created were not directly related to student achievement. I had a bigger Wicked Problem on my mind; my inventory. I currently have 85 wind instruments that are shared between two band classes (around 50 students each) and 78 string instruments shared between 3 classes (around 50 students each). In my situation, for example, one Violin is used between 3 different students throughout the day. That's not really a problem in the classroom, but when my instruments start going home so students can practice after school, I need to know who has what and at what time. I also provide my students a method book at the beginning of the school year. The wind players need their own mouthpiece and may also need a ligature or neck strap according to what they play. I have a lot of inventory that I distribute and need to keep track of so at the end of the year I can collect it all back and hold my students accountable. In the past I used paper/pencil and eventually moved to OneNote and Excel spreadsheets to keep track of everything, but I was never satisfied with those solutions. Creating my records was very time consuming, eating into my class instruction time, and revisiting my records throughout the year for new and exiting students was a cumbersome process trying to figure out what was available and what was needed....during class. These were my own wicked problems, and this year I solved them with PowerApps.
Instrument Checkouts
I created a PowerApp that turns my smartphone into a barcode scanner for collecting instrument checkout records, and it has made this after-school routine a streamlined stress-less process for my students and me. I've previously blogged about using a Bluetooth barcode scanner paired with my phone, entering in the scanned text strings into an Office form. This process worked and got the job done, but it wasn't the best solution. The Bluetooth scanner wouldn't work outside in the sunlight while I was on gate duty, sometimes it had connection issues or just wouldn't read my barcodes, and the process wasn't quick. However, this year the routine is a breeze using the new PowerApp I coded. My smartphone's camera captures the barcodes and the data is automatically written to a SharePoint list. Within the app I can also look up previous records to see which student was the last to check out a particular instrument. No more opening up and searching through a spreadsheet. Now I can just type “Violin 19" into my app and "hey, looks like it was Suzy Q who checked it out two days ago and hasn't brought it back from home yet." I'm saving time now, and my students can check out and get out my door faster to their waiting parents. That's important now since I now have about 20-30 students on average swinging by my room after school to grab their instrument and take it home.
 Grabbed this pic on Saturday, so no checkouts today obviously, but check out Friday's numbers :-) |  I can search through my check out records and delete them too. |
Assigning Inventory
This year I've been collecting my school's old 4th Gen iPads we've had for 5 or 6 years. My school is now a Chromebook school, but I prefer tablets over laptops in my desk-less classroom (plus inking and OneNote of course). Four of my five classes are now 1:1, so that's another inventory item I must keep track of. To help streamline the assigning of instruments, accessories, method books, and iPads, I created a PowerApp to help me filter through my inventory lists and assign/select materials for my students. The app is connected to and pulls in my inventory item lists that are stored on SharePoint in my district’s Office 365. My student roster list is saved to an Excel spreadsheet saved in my OneDrive, and also gets pulled into my app when I open it up. In the app, my dropdown controls act as filters for these lists, allowing me to quickly get to the items I need to see. I coded the app so items on the lists that have already been assigned for that given class period are pink, so I know not to select them. All I have to do now is select the period I'm in, select a student, select the items they're getting, and then hit the Assign button. The selected items are combined into a record that is saved to another SharePoint list (which is then incorporated into my Power Bi algorithms afterwards 😉). Within the same app I created a separate screen to lookup my students and see what materials they've been assigned (iPad #245, Clarinet #10, Clarinet Method Book 1 #17). This really helps when a student's book is missing (they left it in my class) and he/she can't remember what book number they have. I just open up my app and lookup their record. Using my inventory Power App (that I coded myself 😁) this year, assigning materials has been super easy and a much faster process than previous years.
An early version with fake student data
Latest version. Green means the student has been assigned materials. Materials in pink means the item is no longer available during that class period.
Of course I'm gonna utilize this data in Power Bi :-)
Now I'm tracking the rate at which different sections within a class are checking them out, based on how many instruments have been assigned in that section.
I've coded two other apps so far; one for my school's PE department, and another that can be used school-wide by my school's faculty to better track student tardy data…but this blog post is already too long to talk about those. I have other ideas forming in my head too, apps I can create and incorporate into my music classroom to expand my pedagogy, track mastery, and collect data related to classroom management. PowerApps provides the development platform to design and code my ideas, and Office 365 provides the data storage resources I need. All these resources are sitting right there in my district Office 365 license.
So, I've hit a point in my career where I'm able to apply the CS skills I've picked up over the past few years to create solutions to problems relating to my job and pedagogy. This idea is what we want students to do; use their learned CS skills to solve "Wicked Problems", but at the same time, let’s not forget about teachers. Teachers are also learning and acquiring CS skills, and they have their own wicked problems they would like to solve too. With the continued push for CS in education along with the continued development of user-friendly app development platforms, will teachers in the future become their own problem solvers by creating applications that fit their exact pedagogical needs, rather than rely on third party software vendors that may or may not? PowerApps gives me the tools I need create solutions to my specific pedagogical problems, and if you have a district Office 365 license, you should check it out.
So, I've hit a point in my career where I'm able to apply the CS skills I've picked up over the past few years to create solutions to problems relating to my job and pedagogy. This idea is what we want students to do; use their learned CS skills to solve "Wicked Problems", but at the same time, let’s not forget about teachers. Teachers are also learning and acquiring CS skills, and they have their own wicked problems they would like to solve too. With the continued push for CS in education along with the continued development of user-friendly app development platforms, will teachers in the future become their own problem solvers by creating applications that fit their exact pedagogical needs, rather than rely on third party software vendors that may or may not? PowerApps gives me the tools I need create solutions to my specific pedagogical problems, and if you have a district Office 365 license, you should check it out.
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