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Tools: Figma
Focus: User Interface/Experience
Google Classroom
An update for the Google Classroom digital learning platform to meet early childhood education formats.
Prompted to Action
There is a lack of education platforms catered to younger students. They are stuck with boring platforms that disrupt the purposefully structured curriculum.
Below I will go through a redesign of the popular Google Classroom I’ve done after conversations with teachers and research on early childhood education; improving the digital classroom experience for both students and teachers.
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Screenshots will be blurred for the privacy of students and teachers.
Class Homepage
Each class has a 'Stream' page where students and teachers can post to the class.
At the head of the page is information about the class and a link to the virtual classroom.
And to the left is a short to-do list of your upcoming assignments.
The biggest issue here was a lack of hierarchy, important teacher posts would get drowned out by other posts. Google Classroom has a function to re-elevate your post to the top, but in the process of teaching, that is not enough. Allowing teachers to pin posts saves everybody time and energy.
Another update was a better indicator for live video sessions. In the existing design there is nothing other than a link posted by the teacher, which can be easy to miss. Now there are digestable groups of information that make it easy to understand whats happening today versus tomorrow versus yesterday.
Class Homepage Updated
Classwork List
The second most used tab is the Classwork tab.
Here students have access to a single list of all of their assignments - past, present, and future.
This seemingly endless list of assignments is daunting and unenticing.
This page nullifies any excitement to do an activity, something important in early childhood education.
Classwork List Updated
Teachers organize their work either by subject or by date, typically by date. And while schedules need to be flexible, there is a general order set at the beginning of the school year.
With teaching plans mostly in place from the start of the year, I thought that a calendar would be a more effective way to organize and view assignments for both students and teachers.
The assignments can be filtered by subject or by date, the way they are initially created. Creating a focused and organized view of assignments that is less overwhelming.
Since learning the calendar is part of early childhood education, the version of a calendar I have designed labels only three days - yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Implementing color to the calendar view creates a more inviting environment:
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differentiate assignment subjects, something the teachers do on their own.
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a new ‘Assignment Status’ to visually represent their progress.
With a quick visual reminder of their work, the students are incentivized to complete it all in a timely manner. Gamifying the learning experience.
Each assignment starts as 'Not Done' - a red stop icon
Upon opening the assignment the status would change to ‘Working’ - a blue plus icon. Alternatively, the status can change when the student attaches their work.
Finally, they would mark the work as done with the button and the status would change to ‘Done’ - a green checkmark.
Assignment Page
When a student clicks on an assignment, they are brought to a new page with instructions (bottom left). Below the assignment, there is a space for comments from the class.
There is also a separate tab for the student to attach their work (top right) and two different spaces to leave comments for either the class or for the teacher.
This sub-navigation creates an unnecessary separation between the assignment and the classroom environment. And the two separate class comment sections creates a confusing redundancy.
Assignment Page Updated
To improve these interactions, I condensed them into one page where the students can either comment on the assignment or speak privately with a teacher about it.
To continue representing the student's work status I added the new ‘Assignment Status' above the student's attachments, along with 'done' and 'attach' buttons colored to match the status.
This page allows the students to work on their assignments without navigating away from the virtual learning space. The updated site map can be seen below, showing a more direct path through each page to the pertinent information.
To-do List
The existing to-do list falls short in the same ways as the classwork list: it's a boring list.
With the new ‘Assignment Status’, it is easy to organize to-do list items by assignment status.
This creates an easy visual representation of the day’s work and incentivizes the student to complete their assignments. You would be able to filter the items by date, subject, and assignment status creating an actionable list of tasks. This way a child's guardian can quickly identify work to be done as well.
Grades Page
Continuing to implement the ‘Assignment Status’, as a visual representation of the work, as well as the ability to filter by subject quickly improves another dull and cluttered page.
This creates a table of information that is much easier to digest. The student’s view will, again, incentivize completing assignments with the introduction of the colored assignment status. This also gives parents an easy view of their child's work without having to process any more than they need to.
Side-by-side
Screenshots of the current Google classroom side-by-side with the redesigned page for easier visualization of the changes. Click the image to get a larger view.
Past this Point
While I think that young students would benefit from a more interactive digital environment to replace the in-person setting, I decided not to overcomplicate the interface and tried to maintain the Google aesthetic. I hope to continue working on what a more exciting, digital education environment might look like, including the video meeting screen, which has incredible potential for engaging younger students during lessons. These things could be interactive illustrations to gamify assignment submission or digital avatars to dress up for the day's lessons.
Looking into the future, digital teaching platforms can be used to teach children across the globe from your home. I don't believe that a digital experience could replace the in-person experience of primary school, but done correctly the students can learn and engage as much as they otherwise would. My only regret is that I don't have an easy way to create a platform for teachers to use; because from what I have heard, these platforms did not have some of their users in mind.