Getting Started with Microsoft Graph and Education

Key Takeaways

welcome my name is Darrell Miller and I'm here with Gareth Jones hey thanks army Darryl it's great to have you here today we're going to talk about the Microsoft graph education API so tell us about the education API Gareth well great question well there's lots of amazing education apps out there I imagine a teacher go into a conference getting excited about your bunch of applications and they get back to their classroom will you know bust until you have a go with them and then when they get started the first thing they've got to do is go and usually get the names of all of their students in all of the classes they teach load it up into the applications and that doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun no no it can be it can be kind of a barrier to entry especially if you think about that multiplied by all of the classes that a teacher's teaching so how does the graph help with that well most of that information lives in the backend systems that the school uses to to run their applica they're their actual work that the school does so they've got an application that has all of the classes all of the teachers teaching those classes and which students are in which class list yeah and and so then how do they then get that information over into the graph so that in those systems are very diverse so we've got an application that's part of office 365 if you're an education customer of Microsoft called Microsoft School Data Sync and Microsoft school data singh makes the connections through to that very diverse set of school information system applications and loads all that data into the graph regardless of which system you are using so it's all just there ready for you to consume ok so now it's in the graph how do i how do I now get at it in the graph okay well it's let's show you we've got some some education api's in the graph with an education node so if you look here we've got an education /me node so I can go and see the things that are relevant to me in education and we'll take a look at the classes so the first thing you might want to do when you're bringing on for the education API is have a picker for the teacher to go and select the class that they're currently teaching so that won't be mean classes here so if I go and run this you'll see I'm signed in into an education tenant and then I'll go and scroll down and have a look at the list of classes that me so I'm logged in as a teacher account to you and you can see that I've got a bunch of records coming back talking about a the set of classes I'm a maths teachers I've got a bunch of maths classes going back and just a very simple JSON showing me the the descriptions of the classes codes for the classes and what term I'm teaching each class in and that kind of thing so that's the first thing I typically do so then I take the ID of one of those classes so I'm just going to go whoops copy paste the one of these IDs and and then go and paste that in to the to the classes API under education so I'm going to do education slash classes and then paste in that ID and then choose the members of the class and run that all right so now what I've done is I've said hey go and find me the classes sorry the individual class that I picked and tell me all the members in it so this going to give me myself as the teacher because it was my class and then all of the students that are in the class so you can see straightaway I'm at the top there is the teacher with the primary role teacher so I can pick out it was the teacher and there might be Co teachers or assistant teachers or something like that and then as I scroll down then you'll see that what I've got here is some students as well so here we've got somebody whose primary role is student and this uni would be about you know typically thirty students in the class area i've got a bunch here and i can go and build a an experience for all of those students coming in and we can be relying on the fact that this is just always up-to-date because there's this background sync process synching with whatever is the school's back-end system that's exactly right yes those are typically I upload it overnight something like that so it'll always be up-to-date so with all this information in the graph what what else might we be able to do with the graph API well there's a couple of new things we've got coming up that we've just released previews up one of the requests that we very frequently get from partners is that they would like to be able to communicate with parents of their students so for example you know we all got that experience of getting a whole lot of paper slips home for permission slips I'm sure well no they usually don't come home for me and then we find out five days later that they should have come home that's right but they're just lost in the bottom of a backpack right so those kind of things it's great to automate those and mate start to make those electronic going forward so having that information on the graph we've added a set of contacts to each student so you can go and say the contacts for parents or guardians or maybe a carer for a student to be able to go in and reach those so we've just added that and you can go get that with related contacts under each student and then another thing that that you may want to do if we've talked about this interactive scenario where you just go and pick from users and the classes that they're working with but you may have an application that really has a database entirely of its own full of students and teachers and you need to synchronize that with the backend student information system so to do that you don't really want to have to go and pull the entirety of the data every day that would be inefficient and do your own comparing so what we've done is we provided a delta api on all of those collections students teachers schools classes did you get the changes to just get the changes exactly so let's have a look at that so I'm gonna use postman because we want to use an app only token okay go and pull that because typically what we'd be doing is building some kind of back-end daemon application that was running to go in and pull that information it wouldn't be an upfront application that was interacting and currently you can't do app only requests using graphics that would be a great thing to ask for renews the voice wouldn't it yeah absolutely would it is on the roadmap so we're working on excellent cool I'll look forward to that so here is postman so you can see I'm making call here to education classes and now I've put Delta on the end so it's as simple as that really and you can do that on any of those collections that I talked about so I'm gonna hit Send and bring back a packet and you can see here I've got an X link so I can go and then under the my next link I've got a collection of all the classes that have changed since I last made the call if I scroll down again a little bit there you go so there's the class that had changed so I'll sit there and repeatedly call that next link to page through all of the classes that have changed since I last made the call and then once I've got to the end of the set of pages I'll get a delta link instead of the next link and that'll tell me hey this is something that you can you've got to the end of the the current set of changes this is a URL you can go and call in the future whereas see if there are any more changes and then you'll get another set of pages so it's really simple to to synchronize your database with whatever the backend system is which you don't need to know at all via the magic of the Microsoft graph is a kind of intermediary right and and therefore you can build all kinds of cool apps without having to re-enter all that data that's coming from that back-end well thank you very much for coming and showing this as this today if people want to find out more about the Education api's where would they go they just go to the graph type Microsoft comm homepage and they'll find an education note in the table of contents with our overview and they can look through all the scenarios and then drill into the references for the education api's there alongside all the other graph Docs that's excellent thank you very much that's a lot