SIMS + Power BI: Intermediate Skills
Create advanced Power BI analyses for your school automatically from SIMS
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Introduction
Microsoft Power BI is an exciting way to create very deep and informative analysis of school data. This course will show you how to integrate Power BI with your secondary school's SIMS system and help you find new insights into your pupils. On this course you will learn how to extract data from SIMS and import it into Power BI. Once your data is in Power BI you'll find out how to create interactive visualisations that help your staff find new insights into their pupils. Learn Power BI with over 8 hours of video lectures on this self-paced course.
Who should take this course
This course is aimed at data managers, business managers, SIMS coordinators and senior leaders in secondary schools who have some experience of using SIMS with Power BI and who want to develop their skills further.
What you will learn from this course
By the end of this course you will be able to:
- Extract data from your SIMS system
- Import the data into Microsoft Power BI
- Process and shape the data from SIMS into the best format for analysis
- Create amazing analyses of your pupil data in Power BI
- Automate the whole process to run termly, weekly or even daily updates
- Understand the key concepts of Power BI, including calculated columns, measures, filters and slicers
This course shows you how to analyse the following information from SIMS:
- Pupil data
- Internal assessment grades and targets
- Subject and class attainment
- Attendance
- Behaviour
- Exclusions
- External exams
- Key stage 2 data
Learn how to create these analyses
By the end of the course you will be creating analyses like these:
May 2020 Note: This course was recorded in the summer of 2019 and uses the old-style Power BI ribbon. Power BI has now received an updated ribbon so the screenshots used in the course video are out of date. The course content is still very relevant and the changes shouldn't prevent anyone learning Power BI effectively. Meanwhile I'm developing a revised version of this course calledPower BI Further Skills. Anyone who joins this course after 1st March 2020 will be given free access to the Power BI Further Skills course as well, when it becomes available.
Course Curriculum
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PreviewDownload Power BI and set up a directory to hold your data
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PreviewGrant yourself 'third party report' options in SIMS (1:54)
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PreviewUsing SIMS Report to extract basic pupil data (11:23)
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StartUsing SIMS Report to extract attendance data (9:22)
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StartUsing SIMS Reports to extract behaviour data (4:31)
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StartUsing SIMS Report to extract achievement data (3:25)
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StartExtracting termly tracking grades from your school assessment system (6:38)
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StartUsing the KS4 Resources with Power BI (4:52)
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StartUsing SIMS reports to extract KS2 prior attainment data (7:44)
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StartUsing SIMS reports to extract A8/P8 data from the KS4 resources (7:04)
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StartExtracting the KS4 'Measures' from SIMS (6:28)
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StartIntroducing our first Power BI visualisation (6:00)
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StartAppendix 1: A copy of the SIMS reports created in this module
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StartAppendix 2: A copy of the CSV files created in this module
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StartThe contents of the CSV files (1:33)
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StartLoading data into the data model (7:24)
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PreviewCreating our first bar chart - values and axis (7:03)
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StartFormatting our visualizations and why it's important to get it right (3:16)
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StartFilters and themes (3:28)
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StartCreate a pie chart to show number of boys compared to girls (6:38)
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StartSEN and Ethnicity graphs (8:27)
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PreviewPupil premium and EAL graphs (2:57)
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StartUpdating the data model to improve our visualizations (7:39)
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StartRenaming columns in the power query editor (4:21)
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StartUsing power query editor to replace blanks in our data (2:30)
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StartUsing power query editor to add a conditional column (2:06)
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StartMerging two columns together using power query editor (3:32)
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StartImporting attendance data - and relationships (4:19)
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StartReviewing attendance data - what have we got? (2:42)
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StartGraphing the attendance data - count, average, sum (5:08)
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StartUsing a table to show how Power BI deals with text vs numbers (5:17)
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StartIntroducing calculated columns - and be careful with percentages! (7:00)
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StartIntroducing Power BI measures - a measure to calculate percentage attendance (4:16)
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StartCreating a guage and a bar chart to show attendance (3:57)
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StartAuto detecting column headers and relationships (6:01)
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StartLoading tables into the data model (3:27)
"May I take the opportunity to thank you for what was a comprehensive, enlightening and instructive set of courses? It has saved a lot of time in learning the intricacies of PBi and will result in a impact on school data."
- Phil Segal, Perins School, Alresford
"Good course David. Very focused for SIMS schools analysis. I recommend this course, Thanks."
- Peter Allen, South Gloucestershire Council via Facebook
Your Instructor
I'm an independent SIMS and Power BI consultant working with primarily with SIMS for nearly 10 years. I spend lots of time in different schools, talking about the best ways to use SIMS and Power BI and creating effective assessment and analysis systems. I run a popular assessment manager blog full of tips and trick for data managers in schools.