Judah's Work
Early on within starting the project I created, with the help of the team, this value proposition canvas in order to brainstorm what we want our product to do for our target audience.
From research gathered it can be seen that teacher attrition is an economic, social and educational concern (Julie S. Long, 2012). Induction programs which heavily involves mentoring can be seen to help alleviate this issue. These programs help alleviate early career teacher attrition, increase teacher retention rates and improve teaching quality(Julie S. Long, 2012).
In order for an induction program to be of quality it needs to pass certain criteria (Julie S. Long, 2012). This includes:
- Educated mentors
- Reflective inquiry and teaching processes
- Systemic and structured observations
- Formative teacher assessment
- Administrators’ involvement
- School culture supports
Other notes found in this article (Julie S. Long, 2012)
- New teachers that reflected on themselves in relation to their work were seen to grow professionally at a greater rate.
- Study examined the use of electronic media, video analysis, to promote reflective inquiry which proved to be very limited as participants could not identify their own teaching attributes
- Mentors observe beginning teachers and provide feedback
- Mentorship effectiveness is heavily impacted on whether the mentor is the same type of teacher as the mentee, type being if they were teaching the same grade and subject
- Emotional and psychological support is important for beginning teachers
- Mentors and mentees can feel limited and frustrated by the lack of time for meeting, discussion, and relationship development.
From these notes it can be seen that the platform being created should be one that encourages mentorship, reflection on one's own work and the work of others, and support for their fellow teachers. This platform will allow mentors and mentees to have more time to communicate as they will be able to continue their discussions wherever at their own leisure. The platform will allow teachers to share lesson plans which will help pass on experience and have comment sections to allow feedback on those lesson plans. If we allow private messaging this could allow teachers to give each other emotional support.
Reference: Julie S. Long, S. M.-R. (2012). Literature Review on Induction and Mentoring Related to Early Career Teacher Attrition and Retention. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 7-26.
Before creating the paper prototype I made sketches to help translate all the functionality I wanted to have and where it would be laid out. Drawing from the research the design needed to allow for ease of access to content that the users would look for and be able to facilitate a community in which users could interact and learn from each other.
The home page I wanted to have the most viewed and highest rated pages on the front so if a new user is just exploring they would most likely want to view those items. However if the user was specifically looking for something then they could easily search on the search bar.
I wanted to make the search page have information about the pages a user would look for so the user could easily sift through all the entries. For example a user may want to only look at the latest posts, or only the most highly rated. So being able to sort through that was important in the design.
Once on the page the user should be able to look at the lesson plan and comment on different parts of it with pointers directly referring to what the comment is talking about.
The user page would have all the information about the user. This includes how long they have been on the site; how long they have been teaching; their contributions to the site such as commenting, posting and uploading.
I created a paper prototype, paper prototype 2, early in the project to allow exploration of different layout while also testing most of the same features as the other paper prototypes. The results of this session were analysed, and used to inform development of the early electronic prototype.
This prototype was tested with a couple of users, and their feedback is recorded under the photos of my paper prototype.
Summary of User Feedback:
- Interface not intuitive enough
- Sort by function
- Differentiate between topics or types of discussion whether it be lesson plan sharing, or questions and answers, or other.
- Related or similar posts at the bottom of the page.
Ideas that arose from the paper prototyping:
-
Being able to ask questions, open threads
-
Anonymizing people who ask questions, have them sending questions to admin and then admin posts the question to de identify the person asking
-
Could also assign Random handles to keep it anonymous
Worked on fixes for the site. When the css was introduced to the site to style it, the site stopped printing posts from the database so I fixed that so it would output the posts from the database again. Also implemented the css onto the form page that creates new posts and allowed for comments to print under each post it was associated with however another was also working on that so we just used his code instead.