Teach Alabama: Conceptual Model By: Andrea Williams Kinnis Gosha Kinnis Gosha Wanda Eugene Wanda Eugene

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.

Project Description cont’d 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.

Lexicon AHSGE: Alabama High School Graduation Exam, required for any student who was a ninth grader on or after the 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.

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

System Specification: Software Word processing program Internet browser Document reader Media Player **or any compatible software**

System Design Macromedia Dreamweaver software From an existing site – p/ p/ 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

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

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

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 or more Computer usage a week 100% Computer usage an hour 11%77% Documents created for classroom usage 11% 66% Internet usage 11% 77%

Testing Results (Final Reaction Survey) Strongly Agree AgreeNeutralDisagreeStrongly Disagree Site was easy to use and learn 33%22%33% It was easy to get started 44% Site is easy to use for beginners w/ minimal computer knowledge 11%55%11%22% It was hard to recover from errors 11% 22%44%11%

More Results (Final Reaction Survey) 1(lo)2345 (hi) Terrible… Wonderful 33%22%44% Frustrating… Satisfying 22% 55% Difficult… Easy 55%11%33% 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 Least interesting Rollover links aren’t consistent Lack of visuals Too much white space Too much text (try bulleting) Menu tag reactions, dead links Bland colors Prototype or application?

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

Final Product