Imagine Learning Classroom
Annotations
Promoting dialogue during classroom discussion
- UX
- Research
- UI
- Front-end dev
The goal
Promote in-the-moment learning and engagement
IL Classroom enables 1 million teachers to spend more time meeting student need and less time building student-facing materials from scratch. In 2021, our digital and print products offered solutions for pre-planned lessons, but required substantial effort to expand on concepts or demonstrate student understanding mid-lesson.
Timeline
5 months
My role:
- Conduct surveys and moderated user interviews
- Competitive research & analysis
- Led brainstorming workshops
- Prototyping & testing
- Front-end development of styling and toolbar interactions
Understanding the classroom
Our team sought to understand the classroom environment through teacher interviews, analaytics, and fullstory recordings. How have classrooms adjusted in a post-pandemic world? We sought to learn about what was happening outside of our product and when. How were teachers presenting content to students, what tools were they using to instruct? How were students sharing their thoughts?
- Teachers use a variety of methods to annotate on top of our content. This ranged from smartboards, whiteboards, to overhead projectors and more.
- To promote classroom participation and classroom management, students did not have access to devices but instead followed along with the teacher.
Key insights
Teachers struggled to keep students on task when students had their own device.
Teachers encouraged students to THINK, PAIR, SHARE.
I spend so much time recreating lesson slides because I can’t draw on top of them when presenting to my classroom.
I know I can edit and save slides, but is there a way to write on them DURING the lesson as I present to my class?
Is there a way that I can annotate over the lesson cards when presenting? Is there a tool in the platform for this?
I use my smartboard to draw on slides, but when I scroll or move the page, my annotations do not move with the content.
Defining the problem
Our team sought to understand the classroom environment through teacher interviews, analaytics, and fullstory recordings. How have classrooms adjusted in a post-pandemic world? We sought to learn about what was happening outside of our product and when. How were teachers presenting content to students, what tools were they using to instruct? How were students sharing their thoughts?
Ideation
We wanted to stress-test what annotating on our lesson cards would look like. How would the annotations scale with content? Would they fall apart on responsive layouts? What tools are currently available in our product that have similar functionality? If there are any, can they fit our use case?
Testing our assumptions
We leveraged a third-party annotation tool to get us up and running quickly to test these hypothesis.
Key findings
- When card content responded to the browser width, annotations would decouple from their intended place
- Prioritzation and understanding of the iconography and functionality of tools
- Where teachers and students expected to annotate
- Learn how long teachers expected annotations to be visible.
What we delivered
Annotations v.1 was released to teachers for Back to School 2022. With the ability to customize card content, we chose to forego saving annotations to further promote the "in the moment" discussions.
Teachers are able to annotate both in class settings as well as in the teacher-led Live Learn experience where teacher-created annotations appear on student devices in real-time.
Outcomes
Our customer success team has received overwhelming excitement from districts, teachers and students about our annotation tools.
Stories from our customers
This is fantastic on so many levels! I love how my annotations move with the page as I scroll.
- 7th grade math teacher
I really like annotations because it helps us learn better!
- California elementary student
Our teachers are able to spend far less time trying to work-around technical limitations in the classroom. The ability to quickly highlight key points or have students show their thinking has helped the classroom keep the focus on learning and not the tooling.
- Illinois public school admin
What's next
Over the course of 2023, we are monitoring annotation usage via FullStory and Mixpanel. We are also keeping an eye out for feedback from the customer support team.
We'll be looking to spot unexpected uses and requests of the annotation tools. We have a hunch that teachers will want to leverage annotations when reviewing student work in order to mark up student responses.
