Teacher ~ Student Progress Monitor

Visual Design Document (VDD)

VERSION HISTORY

Functionality Overview:

The central goals of the Class Monitor:

1)  Allows teacher to PAUSE ALL STUDENT screens.  This gives the teacher much more classroom-management control, particularly for events like group discussions.
If the teacher clicks this button the students gets a message saying "SCREEN PAUSED.  Your teacher has paused the screen."  
All current student work is saved to the local file before the PAUSE screen is displayed.  The Pause Screen occludes all other information on the screen. 

2)   Allows teacher to get a summary of the overall progress of each team at a quick glance.  We do NOT want to encourage teachers to sit at their computer for extended periods.  Instead, we want to encourage the teacher to walk the classroom facilitating student exploration and thinking, with an occasional stop to glance at the Class Monitor and see if a team is having trouble of various types.  The class monitor can put up icons indicating:

          -  Current Step and Visual Progress Bar.  Shows how far along the students are in the project
          -  Special icon flags if the team has a Skipped Note or other skipped assessment item.  (team passed by the Note without completing it)
          -  Average time per Step
          -  Warning icon if students have navigated to sites outside of the links built into the project  (don't know if this is technicall possible)      
 
3)   Messaging Ability.  Teacher can send a message to ALL student teams or select student teams.  Pop-up window here allows teacher to decide who gets message plus write the message.  We probably don't need IM functionality here, as the teacher can simply go talk with a problemmatic team after sending them a message.

4)  Real-Time Step Monitoring.   If the teacher clicks this button they select the Project Run, then they see a list of all the REAL-TIME steps in that project.  This can include DISCUSSION steps, BRAINSTORM steps, and INSTANT POLL steps.  When they select on of these step a Preview of the project is launched.  The teacher sees the step in question, with their monitoring tools active.  (example: buttons that allow teacher to edit/delete a postings in a Discussion, etc).  NOTE:  the teacher can also manually get to any of these Real-Time steps by Previewing the Project (from My Project Runs area in portal), then navigating to the step in question.

5)  Hide Screen.  Teacher needs to be able to hide the screen when they walk away, to keep this summary information from prying eyes.  Teacher enters their W3 password to see the Classroom Monitor again.  (it's possible that we could tell teacher's to use their system-level screen-saver functionality to accomplish this, but this is asking a lot.  It would be much easier for the teacher if we include a built-in, easy to use screen hider.
 
6)  Class Averages Information.   We could present all sorts of summary information here.  Current possibilities include:
         - Average Step    (the mean of progress across all student teams)
         - Average KI score  (based on scores from teacher-graded items like Notes)
         - Average Focus score  (based on scores from auto-graded items like Challenge Questions)
         
[MattFish 4.18.2008]