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Project Overview
AkademiaPro is the UK’s first fully functional collaborative Student and Teacher Planner App. Teachers and students can download their school’s timetable and customise it by selecting the subjects and classes that relate to them. Teachers can create lesson plans, notes and homework assignments for their students, and students can add their own notes and tasks, and even rate the lessons.
Tablets have the potential to revolutionize education. Akademia Pro enables schools, teachers and students to realise that potential in their day to day lives.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
The Homework Diary Company is the UK’s market leader in providing customised printed publications to the education sector. HDC supplies over 1 million Student Planners each year to educational establishments across the UK. In 2012 HDC launched a new company, Appening, in order to develop digital equivalents of its paper-based products.
Compsoft have been specialising in mobile since 2009, having designed and developed web-based applications for many years prior. Compsoft combine stunning interface design with cutting edge development to deliver the best possible app for each customer. Our thirty-strong team lives and breathes mobile - we love nothing more than to apply our passion, creativity, skill and experience to each client’s individual requirement.
Project Brief
Being the UK’s leading supplier of published student and teacher planners to the education sector, The Homework Diary Company/Appening anticipated that the market was about to start embracing the use of mobile and tablet technology as a classroom learning resource. In 2012 Appening partnered with Compsoft to develop the Akademia Student Planner iPhone app.
In 2013, based on market feedback, Appening decided to develop a Teacher and Student app for iPad which could integrate with school Management Information Systems.
The brief for the app was to enable:
• Authenticated but anonymous login
• Teachers and Students to download central timetable information created by the school administrators
• Teachers to create lesson notes and homework assignments to be pushed to all the students in the class
• Teachers to create lesson plans and tasks for themselves
• Teachers to receive (anonymous) feedback from students rating their understanding of particular lessons
• Students to add their own personal lesson notes, assignments and tasks
• All users to be able to further customise their timetable with ‘ad-hoc’ lessons or appointments
• All users to monitor the status of homework assignments and tasks
• All users to set reminders and review previous lessons
In order to support the app a web-based portal was developed, enabling Appening to create schools, users and secure access codes for the app, and allowing schools to upload timetables and manage users.
Project Need
Tablets are transforming the way we teach and learn. Powerful creative tools, interactive textbooks and a universe of apps and content make for endless learning possibilities, all on a device everyone loves to use.
AkademiaPro is the UK’s first fully functional collaborative Student and Teacher Planner App. AkademiaPro integrates with schools’ management information systems to enable all users to create and manage their timetables in the simplest of ways. Intelligent collaboration provides users with a two way communication channel and can be used to instantaneously distribute essential lesson information, such as lesson key notes and assignments. And users can customise the app to suit their needs; creating ad-hoc tasks and assignments, including built-in reminders.
User Experience
In designing the UX it was essential to keep easily-bored students engaged, and to minimise the time required by busy teachers. Akademia Pro therefore enables quick and easy access to functions, combined with bright and interesting presentation. The UI immediately provides the user with the most important information within a familiar ‘virtual diary’.
Once the iPad receives the central timetable, the user selects individual lesson times, subjects and classes, enabling a weekly timetable to be quickly created. The UI presents today’s timetable, to-do list, and calendar; icons inform the user of lessons, which can be tapped to access details and to add notes, assignments and ratings.
Tasks and assignments can be given due dates and reminder dates, and the handy to-do list orders these by closest deadline. The app also provides twice-daily local notifications informing users of that day’s due items. Additional functions are accessed via ‘ringbinder tabs’, including searching and reviewing lesson history, and changing settings (e.g. background theme).
In order to identify the functional, UX and design requirements for the app, Compsoft undertook a Workshop, Specification and Design phase with Appening. During this phase the Appening and Compsoft teams met to discuss requirements and brainstorm implementation ideas. Further to the Workshop Compsoft created a “wireframe” user journey showing the screens of the app and key navigation concepts. Once the wireframes and been refined and agreed, Compsoft created alternative graphic designs, before amending Appening’s preferred designs based on their feedback.
Project Marketing
Many schools struggle to develop an effective implementation plan for their tablets and often don’t gain the maximum benefit from the technology. AkademiaPro is one of very few apps that can be applied to every single lesson of every day and therefore can hugely contribute to the effective implementation of tablet technology within a school.
Appening’s existing customers include approximately 1,200 UK schools who are contacted regularly (typically monthly) regarding their printed publications and to discuss their future plans, including the implementation of tablets. When schools advise that they are implementing tablets the account manager will discuss AkademiaPro and offer a 60 day, no obligation free trial.
Appening also uses tailored campaigns to directly target private schools and schools with 'Academy' status, as these are most likely to implement tablet technology. Furthermore AkademiaPro is featured in the Homework Diary product catalogue, which is sent to 3,500 UK secondary schools.
AkademiaPro has developed a partnership with one school which has implemented tablets with great success. This school is used a benchmark and consultant for other schools implementing tablets. This customer is currently piloting the app and working closing with Appening to help develop and enhance the software.
Project Privacy
Appening sets up each subscribing school with its own password protected login to the web-based portal, and defines the number of user keys they will have to allocate to teachers and students. The system generates the keys, and the school logs in to access them, then provides the keys to its students and teachers. The app is downloaded free of charge from the App Store but the key must be entered before the app can be used. On entering the key the app communicates with the backend system and links that instance of the app with the relevant school, as well as identifying the user as a teacher or student (which defines certain functionality within the app).
A school creates its master timetable (via a csv file uploaded to the server); each user associated with the school receives the entire timetable and for each ‘time slot’ selects the lesson appropriate for him or her. The chosen lessons form the user’s personal timetable, and define the communication between teachers and students; a student will receive only lesson notes and assignments relating to their chosen lessons, and the rating of understanding will be anonymously passed to the teacher of that lesson.
The user may add information to personalise the app however no personal data is sent to the server. In the event of device change, loss or theft, a key may be decoupled, preventing access from the original device.
Education
This category recognises education themed apps across all education sectors.
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