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User Observations & Interviews

Teachers

Teacher 1

Ms. Morgan is a music teacher at a public middle school.  Over the past years, she has found that parent involvement is generally important and helpful in their children’s education.  However, it was sometimes difficult to reach the parents.  For example, some parents didn’t pick up their phones and some did not have e-mails.  Nevertheless, Ms. Morgan has a lot of information to convey to parents, such as concert location, times, and dress codes.  In addition, she would like to communicate with the parents of the children who are struggling as well as offer compliments if the students did well.

Teacher 2
Mrs. Krasny is a science teacher in sixth grade.  She also believes that communication with parents is important, as middle school is a transition phase between much parent involvement in elementary school and much student independence in high school.  She mostly communicates using e-mails, because it's fast and non-intrusive.  Mrs. Krasny also mentioned that while most people knew that there were parents with little involvement in their children’s education, there were also parents with so much involvement that they stress their children.  Therefore, she indicated that if possible, she would also like to know the level of involvement of the parents.  

Parents

User Classes

  • Teachers
    1. Teach core subjects
    2. Teach elective subjects
  • Parents:
    1. Parents who are already very involved in their children's schoolwork
    2. Parents who are not as involved

Needs and Goals

Teachers want to:

  • send information to parents efficiently and reliably.
  • easily give positive feedback to parents about their children.
  • deliver negative feedback to parents in a genial manner.
  • know the level of involvement of each parent.
  • keep a professional and well-defined boundary between themselves and parents.

Parents want to:

  • get all the information that the teachers intend to send them.
  • know what their children are learning in school.
  • know how well their children are doing academically and socially.
  • have a hassle-free and readily-available communication channel for communicating with teachers.
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