Teach Alabama: Conceptual Model

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Teach AlabamaConceptual Model

• By Andrea Williams
• Kinnis Gosha
• Wanda Eugene

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Project Description

• In the state of Alabama, educators can utilize
  the resources provided by professional
  development communities. It is encourage that you
  use this website to gather, learn, collaborate,
  share, and support one another in fostering
  learning. We will provide learning material which
  can be shared to promote networking in specific
  subject areas from school to school. This network
  provides an opportunity to share lesson plans and
  curricula aids. Our goal is to create a user
  interface that stores content for new systems to
  support middle and high school students in
  preparing for the Alabama exit exam and
  supporting their teachers in this effort.

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Project Description contd

• The Teach Alabama Website Design and
  Implementation Project is centered about creating
  a user interface that will facilitate computer
  supported collaborative work for teachers in
  Alabama school system. It will serve as an online
  professional development community for K-12
  Educators in the state of Alabama. We will study
  existing similar websites and the provided
  content and create a conceptual model to
  illustrate our design. Our conceptual model will
  be presented to the user for validation and
  verification. After our conceptual model is
  validated, we will create this web presence and
  store the associated content.

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Lexicon

• AHSGE Alabama High School Graduation Exam,
  required for any student who was a ninth grader
  on or after the 1997-1998 scholastic year, test
  students on the eleventh-grade level.
• Computer Supportive Collaborative Work a generic
  term, which combines the understanding of the way
  people work in groups with the enabling
  technologies of computer networking, and
  associated hardware, software, services and
  techniques.
• Curricula aids Help, support, or relief provided
  for the courses of study offered by an
  educational institution.
• Education the activities of educating or
  instructing or teaching activities that impart
  knowledge or skill
• Middle School A school at a level between
  elementary and high school, typically including
  grades five through eight or grades six through
  eight, serving as a bridge between the two.
• Lesson Plan A lesson plan is a detailed
  description of a teacher's activity for a given
  day, week or unit.
• Virtual Community a group whose participants are
  engaged in a dialog by means of information
  technologies, typically the Internet, to share
  information and values.
• User Interface Design The overall process of
  designing how users interact with computers,
  devices and machines.
• Praxis The Praxis series of tests are
  professional assessments for beginning teachers.
  They are a set of rigorous and carefully
  validated assessments that provides accurate,
  reliable information for use by state education
  agencies in making licensing decisions.

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System Specification Hardware

• Minimum RAM 128 mega bytes (MB)
• PC with 300 megahertz or higher processor clock
  speed recommended 233 MHz minimum required
  (single or dual processor system) Intel
  Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron
  family, or compatible processor recommended
• Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher-resolution video
  adapter (32 bit video card) and monitor
• Keyboard and Microsoft Mouse or compatible
  pointing device

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System Specification Software

• Word processing program
• Internet browser
• Document reader
• Media Player
• or any compatible software

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System Design

• Macromedia Dreamweaver software
• From an existing site
• http//www.auburn.edu/harmoch/comp6620/teachprep/
  
• Challenges
• Collecting consistent and organized content from
  other research students working with client
• Displaying the content in a consistent and
  organized manner
• Achieving some of the desired goals of the client
  within our time budget

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Heuristic Evaluations

• Pros
• Good Tabbing and design
• Attractive
• Simple and intuitive
• Well designed layout
• Cons
• Too much white space
• Bland colors
• Hard to find the tour at the bottom

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Usability Testing

• Remote Testing done with 9 users
• 4 teachers (high school, college)
• 5 college students (undergraduate, graduate)
• 4 were usability experts
• Background Survey
• 4 short structured tasks
• Specific tasks designed to test particular
  features of the site
• Final Reaction Survey

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Testing Results (Background Survey)

• Average age of user 33 years old
• All users had PC experience
• Average years of computer usage 13 yrs
• All had experience using a Word Processor
• 7 users have used computers in classroom
  settings, 1 had not, and 1 did not respond

0-1 2-3 4-5 6 or more
Computer usage a week 100
Computer usage an hour 11 77
Documents created for classroom usage 11 11 66
Internet usage 11 11 77
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Testing Results (Final Reaction Survey)
Strongly Agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly Disagree
Site was easy to use and learn 33 22 33
It was easy to get started 44 44
Site is easy to use for beginners w/ minimal computer knowledge 11 55 11 22
It was hard to recover from errors 11 11 22 44 11
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More Results (Final Reaction Survey)
1(lo) 2 3 4 5 (hi)
Terrible Wonderful 33 22 44
Frustrating Satisfying 22 22 55
Difficult Easy 55 11 33

• Least interesting
• Rollover links arent consistent
• Lack of visuals
• Too much white space
• Too much text (try bulleting)
• Menu tag reactions, dead links
• Bland colors
• Prototype or application?

• Most interesting
• Really good design (links, layout, text)
• Very effective and useful for teachers
• Good amount of information
• Attractive colors, good contrast
• Has a tour
• Very comfortable, easy to read
• Intuitive, self-explanatory, conventional

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Redesign efforts

• Menu tag reaction (tab changes color)
• Add more emphasis to working links (subject
  objectives)
• Add more pictures to fill white space (pictures
  from actual Alabama students)
• Links with dead ends refer to actual locations

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Final Product

• http//www.goshanet.com/csci/classes/userinterface
  /index.html