Objectives: The project explores one way to give public school educators relief from the duties of data management and more time to focus on teaching. Another goal was to have teachers integrate the results of their data collection to tailor their teaching to better meet the needs of each student. Our team defined the different tasks that are performed by students, and created a workflow that extends current technology to assist teachers in their day-to-day work.
Methods: Potential users were recruited and interviewed during three phases of our design—1) to identify their needs, 2) after the conceptual designs were formulated, and 3) for prototype evaluation. Six special education professionals were recruited as participants in our focus group and survey. We gathered both subjective qualitative and quantitative information from these six. Our prototyped design was developed for the Tmobile G-1 Phone, using the Android platform.
Results: This formative study helped lay the groundwork for further development. We discovered the most important features of our design are the ability to communicate daily with parents, and to possess all students' information on one device (currently they have separate clipboards for each). While the educators were impressed with the directness of the touch interaction, they were frustrated with the intricacies of activating the touch (the device was not responsive to every touch). Our results showed that the users are interested in seeing the system developed to explore its potential. All of our participants expressed interest in the project and indicated that they would recommend this design to colleagues.
Conclusions: It was important for our design team to create a system that would be convenient to users. Since many teachers we interviewed expressed a great deal of annoyance with their current systems and indicated they procrastinate with data entry. It is our observation that the perceived convenience is of importance in motivating our users to become more active in the data collection process. By focusing on developing a system that maximizes perceived convenience, teachers could directly benefit from reduced stress while students could benefit through closer monitoring. We are interested in further investigating how to provide tools to educators to help maximize teaching time and effectiveness.