If you’re participating in Walktober, you might already be familiar with Looker Studio - it’s what we've been using to showcase stats and leaderboards. Our Walktober dashboard tracks the district’s progress in our fitness challenge, displaying total district steps, average daily steps, and water intake, along with a leaderboard of top participants and campus averages. It also highlights daily activity trends and allows users to filter by week or campus. Using Looker Studio’s "Filter by Email" feature, the dashboard creates personalized individual dashboards, accessible via the link at the bottom right, making it easy for participants to track their own progress.
Beyond tracking our steps, Looker Studio—a powerful data visualization tool that transforms raw data into interactive and easy-to-understand dashboards—has proven to be a powerful tool for education. There is a marked difference between being “data rich” and “data driven”—while we collect a vast amount of data, turning it into actionable insights is where the challenge lies. Looker Studio helps by transforming those endless spreadsheets into clear, visual dashboards, making it easier to spot trends and patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Many campus admin have started using Looker Studio to analyze walkthrough data, and the results have been illuminating. The visualizations make it simple to quickly identify trends in instructional practices and student engagement. The interactive dashboards allow admin to filter the data by grade level or time period, helping them focus on specific areas where teachers may need additional support, ultimately fostering data-driven decision-making in real time. (Interested in learning more? Listen to a deep dive on NISD's use of Looker Studio.)
What makes Looker Studio so impactful is its accessibility and collaboration features. It’s not just for data experts—anyone can engage with these dashboards, encouraging team collaboration. Whether it’s for fitness challenges or formative assessments, Looker Studio helps us move beyond simply collecting data and toward using it to make meaningful changes in our schools.
If you’re interested in learning how to transform your own data into meaningful visualizations using Looker Studio, reach out to your campus Instructional Technologist for support and guidance.
