User Observations & Interviews

Teachers

Teacher 3

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 4

Mrs. Krasny is a sixth grade science teacher.  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

Parent 1

Mrs. Read is the mother of several children ranging in age from nursery to 10th grade.  She feels that it is extremely important to be involved in her children’s schoolwork.  There is generally sufficient communication between herself and her children’s teachers.  For younger children, the teachers often send daily or weekly notes about what they did in school, and the parents sign their children’s assignment notebooks each night after making sure the children completed their homework.  Mrs. Read speaks to the teachers at parent-teacher conferences once a year, and calls or speaks to them informally every few months to check on how her children are doing both academically and socially.  It is easy to reach the teachers because they all have personal voicemail boxes on the school phone, and at back-to-school night they tell parents the preferred way to reach them, whether it is calling them at home or on a cell phone or leaving a message on their school voicemail.
One the Read children, D.W., often forgets things in school, such as her spelling list (although the assignment is written down in D.W.’s planner).  Although Mrs. Read would like to be able to easily access such assignments when her children forget to bring them home, she also thinks that it is important for the children to learn responsibility.
Also, her fifth-grader, Arthur, sometimes receives writing assignments orally, which is a problem since, as Mrs. Read says, “it gets lost in translation.”
Although Mrs. Read feels that she is sufficiently involved, she says that it takes a lot of effort to keep up with all of it, and one of her challenges is making the time to do it.

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.