For Assignment 3 I decided to create an idea for an application that can be used on a mobile phone, tablet, and smart watch.
This application will be a place for teachers to input information about the students in their classroom and guardian communication. They will also be able to see other teacher’s notes to promote a sharing and collaborative work environment.
The application can also be used in other settings, not just education.
Please click the link to my Genially. It is specifically designed to work with a mobile phone, so it is advised that you take the opportunity to utilize the presentation through this means.
Thanks all and please provide any comments below! 🙂 Feedback is welcome.
Hi Jasmine,
Thank you for your presentation, as previously mentioned you certainly hit many affordances and as mentioned, in Alberta we have systems in place for sharing and tracking the information that you have discussed. Teachers can access and log information relatively quickly between PowerSchool and a system called Dossier. I really enjoyed the ability to have a visual showing the number of alerts per student. I wonder if your vision would include archiving information year to year or do you envision it to be cumulative?
I do have a major concern with the safety of student data. While I appreciate that you mentioned it in your presentation, I would be very concerned about having student data on a personal mobile device and the security of such. The device’s risk of breach and/or loss would be high. Not to mention the optics of teachers using cell phones (which is already an issue). Alberta has just banned student cell phones in all K-12 schools (medical exemptions notwithstanding) starting in September. Having to police their usage while then using it ourselves, aside from having to multi-factor authenticate, would be a hard sell to many students and families.
Clearly, your intention behind ELF is for efficiency, transparency, and to increase the quality of communication overall. I really appreciate your student-first mindset with a huge focus on teacher workload. Thank you for your hard work with this project!
Jeannine
Hi Jeannine,
Thank you for your comments.
Like all applications or websites teachers are to use, there are security concerns present. However, this app would allow teachers to log in with their school email and password. This is the same as accessing any website with student data on a mobile device.
In terms of my thoughts about archiving information, I think that all information is valid and should be able to be carried over. My thoughts are that past years’ data can be viewed by clicking on the year in a drop down menu. This way, old information would not crowd the system but still be present if needed.
When it comes to the banning of mobile devices, I do not see this lasting long when we think about the future of our classrooms.
Through using this app, it would be to ensure student success and learning efficiency, therefore, I would not be concerned with the optics as students can use their mobile devices in class when it is used “for health and medical needs, to support specialized learning needs and for educational purposes” (Ridder. 2024), so why couldn’t teachers use it for the exact same reasons? I can not see an administrator or a teacher not using their phones at all during school hours. Personally, I use my phone for emails, calling parents, taking attendance, checking student grades, and more because I am unable to use my computer for managerial purposes during class activities and I can not make calls externally using my classroom phone.
I hope this answers your questions and tackles some of your concerns.
I would appreciate any further thoughts on the matter. I think as we are moving toward the future, classrooms will be more mobile friendly for teachers all around.
Thanks! Jasmine
Ridder, E. Phones banned from Alberta classrooms starting fall 2024. (2024, June 19). Lethbridge News Now. https://lethbridgenewsnow.com/2024/06/17/phones-banned-from-alberta-classrooms-starting-fall-2024/
Hello Jazz,
As a learning support teacher, this is a great tool to keep families informed and students responsible to their actions. This form of communication may centralize home-school student concerns, challenges, and improvements. In my opinion, there is already a lot of contact between schools and families via email, phone calls, and meetings either online or in-person, throughout the school year. It makes me wonder how demanding this could be as an additional task for teachers to do. It could result to an overwhelming amount of responsibility and stressful work conditions for the teacher, feeling obligation to track and log every student they teach. This could perpetuate more demands from families and the teacher wearing more hats. I know private schools already enable families and engage teachers to constantly communicate to families over tedious things. Your topic does have heart and soul, but as a public teacher I am already worked to the core.
And a form of an app may cross the line as I do not want to receive more notifications and such. There are still lots to consider when emplacing such technology. I would be open to this extra task if I was allocated time for it, training, given another work device, and clear guidelines were presented from school boards to families.
Hi Claire,
You certainly have a lot of great points here!
The goal of this app is to document major events and comments about students and communications already being recorded elsewhere. This app would be comprehensive, replacing other tedious tasks, and aim to make teachers’ lives easier, not more stressful. Additionally, the feature allowing teachers to use the app like a checklist can simplify tasks, eliminating the need for extensive writing. Finally, this app would not be able to be seen by parents or students, so information is kept safe and confidential.
For example, you would only need to document in the app that you spoke to parents on Tuesday about Charlie throwing pencils in class and the mother was very receptive and understanding, you have agreed to talk with him and the parents have given permission to send him to the office when this happens. There would be no need to duplicate this elsewhere. Or you could record that a student has not handed in five assignments over the past two months.
This helps teachers understand that communication is already happening, so there is no need to comment further or to make follow-up calls on the same or next day after another teacher has communicated. Also, it would not be expected that everything is documented or that every student has documentation.
Finally, there would be no notifications and no expectation to use this app outside of school hours. However, perhaps we need to be looking at the future of education where each teacher has a work phone with these applications included without the expectation to use them outside of school hours.
Hope this helps! If I can clarify any more, I would be more than glad to. 🙂
Jasmine
Hi Jazz,
Thanks for your A3 idea for a teacher’s aid application. You covered a lot of affordances that are really helpful to teachers and communication tracking in general.
May I ask, which LMS and/or Student Management System does your school use? Where I am in British Columbia, the province went with a province wide student management system called MyEd BC, which does in fact track many of the wish list items on your list such as student designations, profiles, contact info, communication, reporting etc. Some schools use other tools on top of that. There is no app for MyEd however. Power Schools on the other hand which is a dominant system in the space does have apps. Personally I have only used it for HR functionality, but I am sure many of our peers on here use it in its broader LMS/SMS capacity, I wonder if it or other systems out there offer all of the functionality your are looking for in ELF.
It is good to have both a school culture in which your are easily able to connect with your peer teachers and counsellors directly on student issues as well as having a system for quicklly looking at a student’s profile and academic history.
It seems to me that your main point about the ELF app is making something easier, less time consuming, and user friendly which totally makes sense as a lot of lecacy systems are clunky in that regard. I think the ELF app idea could potentionally function as a plugin to a legacy system that lacks some of those afore mentioned affordances.
Thanks for making a mobile friendly presentation.
Rich
Hi Rich,
Thank you for your comment!
To me I do not know most of the key elements that I included in the app.
We use a system called Aspen and it is not user friendly and quite frustrating to say the least. It is also not mobile friendly at all. Most student data is stored on this website with IEPs being in a system called Clever. From my research, there are no apps that are all encompassing and none that are nice to look at and easy to use. If we have everything all in one place, it would make teaching and helping the learners in our classroom a lot easier (hence the name). This app would bring everything into one location and make it mobile friendly. A wish for me would be to see if other teachers are having difficulties with a student or if students are skipping others classes or missing assignments. I would also love to be able to just check to see if another teacher has helped a student focus by using a specific technique. For example, wouldn’t it be lovely to see a student not doing their work and on their phone to being able to look up the students name on your phone and see, within 1 minute, what you could do to help them get back on track? As you know, there are usually about 5 in each class where I need to know more but know nothing. This app would help with this. It would actually have me help students, because let’s face it, no one wants to touch base with home to find out that every other teacher has already called them about an issue and have already reached a solution. I’ve been made to feel stupid on so many occasions because parent’s think that teachers discuss information about students already… which they don’t… and let’s face it… IEPs really tell us nothing about what we can ACTUALLY do for the students in our classroom.
Thanks for your comments and feel free to let me know if there’s anything else you would like to chat about!
Jasmine
Hey Jazz,
This is a really strong response and idea to the issue of technology in Toronto, in which they are moving towards banning cellphones in the classroom in a way that may be quite callous and unsupported when it comes to promoting student participation. I enjoyed yoru Genially in that it was quite linear and logically built for the user in mind, and with hyperlinks that were thoughtfully placed to engage the user.
I think one big challenge is that the functionality of the Genially is geared towards mobile learning, which is considered more informal than that of a computer interface. It is as Gabbard (2019) mentions about how professionalism of what technology to use is deemed as appropriate, such that “Recommendations for digital professionalism are difficult to establish because of the rapid change in technology and the unseen consequences of digital activity that may not be accounted for” (p. 262).
How would you advise an educator in terms of the ban of Bring-Your-Own-Device policies in Toronto in which would make it difficult to interact with this Genially with a laptop in comparison to a cell phone? What are your thoughts in regards to those bans?
References
Gabbard, G.O. Digital Professionalism. Acad Psychiatry 43, 259–263 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-018-0994-3
Hi Alan,
I apologize for any confusion. Is your comment in response to another post of mine or specifically regarding this presentation on the proposed mobile application for educators?
Thank you,
Jasmine
Hey Jazz,
This is regards to the latter half, on proposed mobile application for educators. It was definitely a more general question than one about your Genially, and might be better suited to a post of its own rather than a comment for your A3! I did want to hear your thoughts for sure on the topic.
Cheers,
Alan
Hi Alan,
Thank you for your clarification.
I hope my comments will address your concerns.
First, the Ontario ‘phone ban’ is not as a big deal as it seems. Mobile devices are still able to be used but some apps and websites will be blocked when used through the school WiFi. These issues can easily be avoided by using a VPN or using data. Therefore, Genially and the Easy Learner Facilitator application I designed would not be blocked. There is more of a block for students so they aren’t watching Netflix, TikTok, or playing games during class. Additionally, I do not see there ever being a block for teachers using their mobile devices as we need them for a variety of purposes. With my proposed application, this would inspire teachers to make more use of the devices they have with them all the time. Being able to look at a student’s data with ease in a variety of scenarios would greatly benefit all in an educational setting. However, my proposed application would also be able to be used on the computer as indicated in my presentation.
Second, I specifically designed my Genially to be very fitting to a mobile device as that is all what this course is about. With this said, it also works well on a desktop. Therefore, if someone were to look at my Genially discussing my proposed application, they would be able to do so on a desktop or mobile device with ease. I do not believe anyone would have a difficult time looking at my presentation if they were at a school.
Third, Genially is a professional way of presenting information. I can understand someone’s hesitation to using an application like Genially, Mentimeter, or AHA Slides if they are used to completing work on a document or a traditional slide deck. However, we are moving into a world, and have been in one for years, where information needs to be presented in an interesting way where information is divided into snippets, not in large chunks. If a student were to present a Genially to the class rather than a PowerPoint, I would be more impressed with their efforts.
Thanks,
Jasmine