How Microsoft Power Platform Can Empower School Principals in Emergencies
Part 2 in a 4-part series. View Part 1 here.
By: Musa Abu Hadeed, Nisreen Kassem & Nayla Abi Antoun
March 11, 2024
Power Platforms
Emergencies come in short bursts or long marathons. Quick responses offer safe spaces, emotional support, and basic skills. Long-term plans rebuild schools, empower educators, and promote peace and growth for a brighter future (Education in Emergencies | INEE, n.d.).
As a consequence of the pandemic, classrooms have shifted to online platforms, with Zoom, Teams, and Google Classroom emerging as popular global solutions for remote learning. In Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan, public schools primarily utilize Microsoft platforms for educational purposes, while private schools have the option to use Zoom, Google Platform, or any other platform they want.
In collecting data and managing daily affairs in school, leaders often encounter challenges, which increase exponentially during emergencies. Using online forms, surveys, or direct chats via common messaging apps can lead to data loss, errors, duplicated information, and decreased effectiveness. Finding efficacious pre-existing solutions is difficult, and developing customized platforms usually requires considerable resources. Microsoft offers a solution to empower school leaders by enabling them to build custom apps and databases, without coding, that can be easily distributed as mobile apps for teachers or integrated into existing distance learning platforms like Teams (Power Apps Transforming Professional Development in the Education Sector, 2023).
This empowers leaders to:
- Optimize data collection and minimize errors, leading to improved, data-driven decision-making.
- Automate routine jobs and free up time for focusing on crucial matters.
- Improve information accessibility and analysis using centralized data.
At the core of this solution lies Power Platform, a suite offering:
- Power Apps: Build custom apps from scratch or existing templates catering to specific data collection needs, eliminating error-prone manual processes.
- Power Automate: Streamline workflows with automated routines, freeing up valuable time for higher-level tasks.
- Power BI: Gain data-driven insights through intuitive visualizations and analysis, empowering sound decision-making.
By utilizing this solution, school leaders can navigate emergencies more effectively and dedicate their valuable time to ensuring the academic success and well-being of their students.
Many regional schools depend on older, paper-based methods for their administrative data. They face a real challenge during emergencies, as online attendance and grading systems aren’t flexible enough to adapt quickly in a crisis. When a student experiences an emergency, like trauma, fear, nervousness, or disruption to their education, the lack of immediate response can worsen the situation. These emotional effects extend to the family as well. That’s where the Power Platform, a Microsoft product that allows schools to build custom mobile apps, comes in. In the remainder of this article, we will demonstrate how to build an app specifically for children, offering them tools and resources to cope with emergencies and providing consultation options for families seeking emotional support.
This app would provide two key functionalities:
1. Reporting: Teachers can create, submit, and share a report about consultations and support for students who need mental health support.
2. Tracking Progress: The principal, teacher, counselor, and parents stay informed about consultations with real-time automated updates.
Choose the Right Data Storage for Your App
Building a mobile app involves data storage, and Microsoft Power Platform provides options such as Dataverse, SQL, and Microsoft Lists. We recommend opting for Microsoft Lists due to its simplicity and speed. It offers easy setup, customization without technical knowledge, and seamless conversion of data lists into apps or reports with minimal effort.
Here is how:
- Create lists within Microsoft Lists (Figures 1 & 2). To create a list click on the new list button> choose blank list> type your new list name and description.
2. In our example, we need to create two lists, one for students and one for consults, with customized columns (Figures 3 and 4 below show how to create these columns). You will repeat these steps for each of the lists.
Student list (Figure 5) which includes the following suggested columns: name, class, section, birthday, parents’ names, parents’ email, and phone number. Do not forget to define the format type of the column (text, date/time, etc,) after adding it in order to perfectly match your app’s specific requirements.
Consult list (Figure 6) which includes the following suggested columns: student name [using lookup from Student List function*], counselor, educational advisor, reason for consultation, date, warning signs (such as panic, worrying, stress, etc), procedure, etc. (* Lookup: In a list relationship, information from one list (the source list) is automatically shown in another list (the target list). List relationships let you join information from two lists and keep it consistent while people edit and delete list items.)
- Define columns within each list to capture the necessary data.
- N.B. Do not hesitate to adjust the columns to perfectly match your app’s specific requirements.
Convert Any List to an App
Forget coding! One-click turns your Microsoft List into a dynamic mobile app with this three-screen (browse, edit, and details ) marvel. Browse open student reports with ease, create/edit information seamlessly, and delve into individual cases for deep data insights. Drag-and-drop and personalize the interface to your liking. Build the app you need, fast and easy, with the power at your fingertips.
By doing this step the platform forwards you to the power apps page and creates your application with three main screens (figure 8):
Customize the app to match your needs (figure 9 right). Show or hide specific fields using the visible property, ensuring data security and access control. Plus, use required fields to validate data and prevent empty entries.
Save Time Using Automation
Power Platform streamlines education, freeing time for what matters, and reducing manual tasks like informing parents and consultants about student reports. This automation will free time for impactful, more effective, and productive tasks such as personalized support and detailed note-taking (Figure 10 below).
Figure 10: configuration of the automated flow.
For example, we can harness the timesaving automation function of Power Automate to streamline education workflows to send notifications when a student report is submitted. As shown in Figure 10 above, we follow these simple steps: We choose the second option, Power Automate > Create a Flow > Send a customized email when a new SharePoint list item is added. Then we fill the fields in the Send Email block using the dynamic lookup fields for each as shown in Figure 6.
Publish, Share, and Run
This app is accessible via the free Power Apps mobile app or web version on various devices. Sharing the app with users like teachers and consultants makes it appear in their Power Apps list (Figures 11 left & 12 below).
However, it is important to remember:
- Data access is separate: Sharing the app does not grant data access. You will need to share the underlying data list separately.
- Security first: For data protection, grant users “Edit items” permission within the app instead of full list access. This allows interaction while safeguarding sensitive information.
By following these steps, you can ensure users have access to the app and data they need while maintaining security.
Insight Data: Analyze, Predict, and Ensure Quality with Power BI
Data is the key to unlocking a deeper understanding of your school(teachers and students trends). By analyzing vast amounts of information, you can gather valuable insights, make data-driven decisions, and even predict future trends.
Here’s where Power BI comes in:
- Quality assurance
- Informed decisions
- Meaningful insights
To generate interactive reports from a data set, start from your list’s main menu, and then choose “Integrate > Power BI > Visualize the list.” This instantly shows powerful insights from your data.
Example: Analyzing Student Attendance
Accessibility to this data is achieved with minimal effort, requiring only a few clicks. Imagine transforming a self-constructed Power Apps attendance list into a dynamic Power BI report. This report could unveil valuable insights, such as individual student trends and class engagement patterns (Figure 13).
While emergencies pose significant challenges for education, they also unlock opportunities for innovation with tools like Power Platform. School principals can leverage custom apps, automated workflows, and data insights to streamline tasks, personalize learning, and make informed decisions, fostering student well-being and continued learning even in turbulent times. As technology advances, the potential to bridge educational gaps and build resilience in crises grows exponentially. This empowers not just school leaders, but the entire educational ecosystem to navigate emergencies with confidence and emerge stronger.
References
Education in Emergencies | INEE. (n.d.). https://inee.org/education-in-emergencies
Power Apps transforming professional development in the Education sector. (2023, August 15). Chamonix. https://chamonix.com.au/casestudy/power-apps-transforming-professional-development-in-the-education-sector/
Microsoft Power Apps – Build Apps with AI | Microsoft. (n.d.). https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-apps
Microsoft Power Automate – Process Automation Platform | Microsoft. (n.d.). https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-automate
Power BI – Data Visualization | Microsoft Power Platform. (n.d.). https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-bi?country=us
Microsoft. Microsoft Support. (n.d.). https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-list-relationships-by-using-lookup-columns-80a3e0a6-8016-41fb-ad09-8bf16d490632