Teachers have a difficult job. Even more so when those teachers never actually physically meet their students. Students log on and do their work, seeing words typed by a faceless name of “Mrs. Thompson”. Wouldn’t it be great to add a face to a name? To add emotions and reality behind knowing who your teacher is? This is what the goal of the “Vlogger” project was, to help add a humanizing factor to teachers for students to know that their teacher wasn’t just another person, but another human being.
Purpose: Humanize the teacher.
Means: Through teachers uploading videos and discussions, adding easy to access teacher information, as well as allow teachers to upload photos of themselves.
Result: Students feel more ownership of their work and school, effectively raising retention rates and grades across all grades.
This project was the direct result of a 24-hour company sponsored hackathon. We began this project by having Product Development, Marketing, and the CEO of the company meet together to discuss this idea that the CEO had to help add ownership to a students online schooling experience. We discussed for about an hour going back and forth about product expectations and vision and then moved into brainstorming and wireframing ideas on a whiteboard. After that the software engineers moved onto setting up a foundation that we could build our application off of with Ionic, which is a nice and modular framework that we could utilize to build quickly. I built the screens you’re seeing here in about 7 hours off of a few whiteboard sketches and some market research I did on my own.
We then took the designs and then started to implement them into a working application. Ultimately we got a rough application after about 24 hours that included –
- Dashboard with menu functionality
- Video uploading
- Dashboard updating on video upload
- Live stream functionality
- Mostly responsive (looked best on mobile since that was target breakpoint)
Dayne Petera 