Classroom UX
A Designer is Born
One of the best things that happened to me during the Covid pandemic was that I was forced to teach completely online. I was introduced to loads of awesome technologies like Flipgrid, Jamboard, Google Meet, Zoom, Canva, Canvas, and more.
By my final year of teaching in 2021, I made it my mission to master Canvas and use it to the utmost to better serve my students, and in the end, the teachers with whom I co-taught.
Although I was not officially even a UX/UI design student, I was doing a lot of basic UX/UI design work.
A Bitmoji classroom is a simple Google slide with elements that are hyperlinked to various websites or learning materials for students.
Canvas is the learning management system my school used, and for English learners, any learning management system can be dry at best, and super confusing at worst. I wanted to create a personalized, easily-navigated home page for my Canvas course so that students would know exactly where to go for any materials or information for my English class.
English Language Arts
My own class where I would change this design daily at first according to how I observed students interacting with it. I tried to keep it as clean and simple as possible. See video for more details.
Biology
Created for the Bio class I co-taught. Highlighted current unit of study for easy signaling.
Again, I tried to keep this page and all information architecture for this course as simple and straightforward as possible for our English Learners.
Algebra 1B
This Bitmoji classroom was created mainly as a template for the Algebra teacher with whom I co-taught. This Canvas course and Bitmoji classroom mainly contained links to resources for students.
UX Design in Teaching
Teaching English learners over the years has provided me rich opportunities to design and write with users in mind. From writing content, instructions, and assessments for the courses I taught in my own classroom, to co-teaching and collaborating with other teachers and teams of teachers, I've been a resource and an advocate for students and teachers.
There is a certain perspective one needs to write and design course materials when the learners' English proficiency is limited. This perspective obviously comes with time and experience, and more importantly a teacher has to constantly revise that perspective each time a new student enters the class.
When most teachers create and write tasks, they do it with the average American student in mind--a student who has been raised and educated in the U.S., is fluent/literate in English, and whose parents were also educated in the U.S. Part of my job was to review my colleagues' learning and assessment materials and rewrite or tweak things like syntax, vocabulary, presentation (i.e. adding an image) to maximize student comprehension and to ensure students were being assessed on the content rather than on their English skills.
Essentially, the instructional part of my job was to know the students and the curriculum and figure out the best ways to get the two connected in meaningful ways.