Individual Project Retrospective

This was a very interesting project to take on as I was someone going into a group that I didn’t know a lot about what they wanted to create. I knew their concept was the most interesting to me, as I wasn’t part of the initial discussions I wasn’t sure what I would be able to initially add to the group.  I found this project to be a huge learning curve in all the best ways. Each member of the group taught me a lot about different platforms, issues they face in their daily teaching and how to work to each member's strengths. Working with this group was one of the highlights of this course and I hope to be able to work with them again in upcoming courses. I was also able to have time to reflect on my own practices and my school board’s practices and really analyse what works for me as a teacher and what really doesn’t.

When reading research  for the proposal part of the project I found reviews about many different LMS systems. The research I read spoke to how usability could be considered one of the main reasons for users' selection of a particular LMS. Usability in an LMS can improve the learning experience for students and instructors, increase adoption and usage of the platform, and lead to better outcomes. Some of the main factors people brought up when choosing and staying with a LMS are organisation size, cost, its intuitive nature, ease of use, customizability, support provided, and support of all different content formats (images, text, videos, etc.). When building the concept of GradeNook, we used chats and group meetings to share and grow our knowledge of the issues we face in our day to day teaching. From these issues we shared as well as the ones we found through research we were able to build, what we believe would be, a tool that teachers, administrators, students and parents would really benefit from using.  

When thinking about what we would do differently I believe it would be beneficial to take more time to create more display options for how the grading is presented to teachers (blocks like powerschool or paper grading books, rubric style, comment formats, stars, video, audio, etc.) I know different teachers prefer inputting their data in different ways so I think having options available would be a selling point to bring teachers back to GradeNook. I also believe it would be beneficial to add a page that administrators can input data collection from teachers and they can see/formulate reports they may need for their boards. Instead of having to send teachers to many different platforms they could have a space available to collect or input the exact data needed. Finally, I would like to add an aspect of success through a rewards system for younger students especially. I think this platform could be used from elementary through to highschool but would need some graphics and enticing features to really bring students in and encourage them.