What are District Dashboards and why Power BI?

Power BI is an analytics service that delivers fast insight of informed information about our entire district.  Forsyth County Schools is, and will continue to be, a leader in technology and now is the time to expand the "power" of our existing data and turn it into nearly real-time easy to use custom dashboards.  Our primary ongoing goal is to create customizable, easy to navigate, dashboards with reports containing all district data for every department as a tool to create predictable and actionable items integrated with artificial intelligence to facilitate a successful educational experience and career readiness.

Forsyth County Schools partnered with vendors to work alongside our internal teams on a very aggressive eight-week schedule to develop a district owned data warehouse for this Power BI project, building an Analysis Services Model and Power BI reports with dashboards. Without the resources of skilled vendors and the FCS Network Operations team, the average timeline to solely produce a proof of concept model could typically exceed three months, while we felt the absolute need to put this powerful tool in the hands of our staff as quickly as possible.  The reports cover data and metrics about attendance, grades, GPA, test scores, CCRPI Scores, ESOL, SPED, IST, SST, behavior incidents, teachers, and more!  We are working on rollout phases and schedules and will continue to send internal updates with expected access and enhancements to this new tool.

Forsyth County Schools is undergoing this initiative to architect and develop a data warehouse with reporting through Power BI. The data warehouse is being used to integrate multiple data sources and create a standardized analytics platform. The data warehouse is used Azure Analysis Services to provide data integration and data models designed for ease of educational use.

Once all phases are deployed, all district staff will be able to access their reports with the ability to make their own custom dashboards by accessing Classlink and locating the Power BI icon.  Note: Due to security, each user will be placed in applicable security groups in order to preserve confidentiality and aid in ease of use for your applicable information.  Phase 1 will solely focus on internal dashboards with a goal in future phases to create public facing dashboards.

"Education and Learning Analytics Market Worth $7.1 Billion by 2023"
Below are examples of possible dashboards and not actual data from Forsyth County Schools.

So what does it take for Forsyth County Schools to implement Power BI?

First and foremost, it takes the support of our district leadership and staff to implement a tool like no other that allows all departments deeper insight at the tip of their fingers.  To give school staff a resource to proactively implement course correction is an educational game changer!

• Power BI

• Setup Azure Resource Group

  • Azure Analysis Services (AAS)

  • Azure Data Factory (ADF)

  • SQL Instance (SAAS) within Azure

• Automate Power BI and Azure

• Two local servers on VSAN private cloud

  • One server is a gateway to connect to Azure and Power BI (O365)

  • One server is a gateway to facilitate communication between our on premise SQL server (FCS-SIS-DMS-003) 

If you have a data source report that is not listed above, please submit the District Dashboard Reporting Source Request Form

If you have any constructive feedback on improvements for the analytics that Technology Services can review for implementation, please submit your information on the District Dashboard Reporting Feedback Form.

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