Blog

• Facebook job ads targeting younger applicants. Over 40? You won't even see the advert. More on the power of the big social tech companies.

• What happens to the OU in a world MOOCs? Is higher education now a commodity and how can the OU survive?

• UK's Nudge Unit tests machine learning to rate schools and GPs. Machine learning might spot failing schools and mean fewer Ofsted inspections.

• Google and Gallup’s computer science education research: six things to know. Boys and girls equally interested in computer science at age 12 but not two years later.

I signed up for a new Skype number today and then spent two frustrating hours trying to get it to receive calls before finally stumbling upon the solution.

I use Skype on a Macbook with the latest version of Mac OS. And I was using the latest version of Skype - the new redesigned app. All the searches I did on the web pointed me to this Skype support page:

• An Assembly Line of Coding Students? Tough questions for the computer science movement - is software development the new blue collar work?

• Education technology meets its limits. MOOCs and why employers struggle to buy into them.

You can use Microsoft Power BI to turn your in-house data into interactive data dashboards and reports. It’s now one of the top two or three business intelligence tools on the market and it’s a great solution for schools that want to get more value from the data they collect about students and learning.

Power BI is very accessible - it’s easy for the non expert to get started - and it is not expensive. With Microsoft Power BI you can:

• Why you should not encourage students to use laptops in lectures. Tell them to use a notebook and pen instead.

• Just 18% of US computer science graduates are women.

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?

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

• Germany bans sale of smart watches to children.

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.

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.