What are some tools or strategies for visualizing and communicating data to students and parents?

2 What tools can you use to visualize and communicate data?

There are numerous tools and platforms that can assist in creating and sharing data visualizations and reports with students and parents. Google Data Studio is a free online tool that enables users to create interactive dashboards and reports from various sources, such as Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Google Analytics. It allows for customizing charts, tables, maps, and filters, as well as sharing reports through email or online. Tableau is a powerful and versatile data visualization software that enables exploration, analysis, and communication of data in various formats such as stories, worksheets, dashboards, and maps. It can connect to multiple data sources including Excel, CSV, SQL, etc., and publish visualizations online or on mobile devices. Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence service that allows for creating and sharing interactive reports and dashboards from various data sources like Excel, CSV, SQL, etc. It also uses natural language queries, artificial intelligence, and augmented analytics to gain insights from the data.

3 What strategies can you use to visualize and communicate data?

Choosing the right tool is essential for effective data visualization and communication, but it is not enough. You should also consider your audience and purpose, select the most suitable type of visualization, simplify and highlight the key points, tell a story that connects the data to the context, and invite feedback and dialogue. Before creating and sharing your data visualizations and reports, you need to understand who your audience is, what they need to know, and what you want them to do with the data. Depending on your data and message, you can use bar charts for comparison, line charts for trends, pie charts for proportions, scatter plots for correlations, etc. To avoid clutter and confusion, remove unnecessary elements such as grid lines, borders, labels, legends, etc., and use colors, shapes, sizes, annotations to highlight the important points. Additionally, titles, subtitles, captions, headings and bullet points can be used to guide your audience through your data story. Finally, you should invite feedback and dialogue from your audience by using questions, prompts, suggestions or challenges.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?