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Cover Image for Vacancy Search and the South Yorkshire Apprenticeship Hub

Vacancy Search and the South Yorkshire Apprenticeship Hub

Sheaf Digital has developed a version of our Sheffield Apprenticeships vacancy search site for the new South Yorkshire Apprenticeship Hub (SYAH). The SYAH vacancy site shows current live apprenticeship vacancies across South Yorkshire. The vacancy data comes from the **gov.uk** Apprenticeship Service API and is updated several times each day.
Software Development
   Microsoft Power BI

Visualising school performance in Microsoft Power BI

It’s easy to get hold of schools performance data about schools in England - data is available for download from the Department for Education website. This post uses the latest end of Key Stage data - the provisional dataset for 2016/17. You can find it here.

What’s the best way to visualise school performance data with Power BI? What is the best way to give the non expert - someone who doesn’t know too much about schools and statistics - an overview of school performance in their home town?

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   Education & Technology

EdTech News - Google Invests in UK Computer Science Teacher Training

  • Google invests £1m in training secondary school computer science teachers.

  • Germany bans sale of smart watches to children.

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   Microsoft Power BI

Looking for insights - Pearson Correlation and measures in Microsoft Power BI

The scatter chart in the last Power BI blog post is nice but it doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the relationship between % free school meals and GCSE performance at the end of Key Stage 4.

It seemed like a next step might be to calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient for the GCSE results/free school meals data.

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   Microsoft Power BI

Scatter Plots, School Performance and Microsoft Power BI

A scatter chart in Microsoft Power BI a great way to the relationship between two values. You plot 2 sets of numbers as a series of xy points and then look for patterns in the data - trends, clusters and outliers.

The scatter chart below is a good example. The data, downloaded from the Department for Education website, is about school performance in 2015/16. It shows the percentage of pupils getting 5 grades A* to C (including English and Maths) at each school together with the percentage of pupils at the school who get free school meals. The source spreadsheet contains a lot of other useful data about schools including location - town, local authority and region.

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8 things to know about Google Classroom

Google Classroom is a great way for teachers to organise, track and mark assignments. It’s free to use - either for personal use outside of school or, if you’re a teacher, in school (or HE). Anyone who wants to use it at work needs to get their school to sign up. Again, it costs nothing so it shouldn’t be too difficult to persuade your school to let you try it out, even as a pilot.

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   Microsoft Power BI

Power BI Cumulative Totals Measure - Visualising the Course Sales Pipeline

This is one way you can use the cumulative sales total measure I described in the previous post. I’ve used a bar chart visual to show how the total value of course enquiries, enrolments and lost opportunities change over time.

This is the DAX for the course enquiries version of the measure and my breakdown of how it works is here:

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   Microsoft Power BI

Power BI Cumulative Totals and Measures - Course Sales Pipeline

This is a nice example of how to create a measure in Power BI to calculate running or cumulative totals. It’s a refinement of a post I did on the SkillsLogic blog about using calculated columns to calculate running totals. In this example I’ve gone a step further used a measure - so the running totals change when the user applies filters to the report.

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What are the top 6 sales channels for a small software development company?

Generating leads is the hardest thing you’ve got to do when you run a software business - harder than writing software, managing tricky clients or even making the sale.

The good news is that there are some specific things you can that actually do work.

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   Project Management

Software Development - How Do You Choose Between Waterfall and Agile?

Waterfall and agile are two different ways organising and managing software development projects. They tend to be presented as opposites - you either choose one or the other - but in reality it usually makes sense not to be too purist and instead go for a hybrid approach that takes the best from each.

What are the differences between the two approaches? In waterfall:

  • A lot of planning, requirements capture and solution design happens up front.
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The SaaS Checklist - Will My Software as a Service idea Work?

Software as a Service has become the standard way to deliver business software to end users - solutions that are usually externally hosted, web based and sold on a subscription basis.

The appeal of SaaS to the software developer is that you don’t have to worry about installing software at a client’s site. And even better, you might not have to visit the client to make the sale. Most SaaS solutions are also multi-tenancy, so you only have to support one installed application.

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