The Student Card

The idea of the student card came from baseball cards. When I was a kid I collected them and could recite the players statistics that were printed on the back of the cards of my favorite players.

I liked the idea of a visual representation of each student and as I planned the app, I always had the idea of a student card in mind.

This led to the concept of a color coded top along with the date of the last conference with the student. By color coding the top, a teacher can quickly determine if they need to conference with the student. 

1. Green means the teacher conferenced with the student in the last 10 days.
2. Yellow means the teacher has conferenced with the student between 11 and 24 days ago.
3. Red means the teacher has not conferenced with the student for 25 days or longer.

The ability to have the iPad sort the cards (in this case by reading conference date) allows the teacher to see easily who needs a reading conference. This hopefully allows the teacher to efficiently plan out their reading conferences. 

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in the comments.

Welcome

Hello World!

I am thrilled to be finally launching Reading Conferences to teachers. It has been in development since the summer of 2010! This blog will be about everything from the development process of the App to anything my little brain thinks of. Thanks for reading... 

When the iPad was announced an idea for Reading Conferences started to formulate in my mind. I remember thinking that I would try to work on this seed idea using only my iPad. I started using the fabulous App Penultimate  to doodle out my ideas (FYI: this was well before it was bought by Evernote...) to draw out my initial ideas. I then used iMockups for iPad to clean up my ideas and also so people would not have to look at my horrible drawings (I am a horrible artist. Penultimate is an amazing product...).

I am not exactly sure what motivated me to use the iPad exclusively for the initial development of Reading Conferences. I think it was the fact that many in the press stated that the iPad was strictly a consumption device and not a creation device. I saw the iPad as the computer for everyone. A tool that makes computing so simple and has the potential to make peoples lives easier... With that in mind, I wanted to prove that the iPad was in fact a powerful simple tool for the masses. This is how the App began to take shape... 

So below is a gallery of five pictures showing my horrible artistic skills as well as the early prototyping of Reading Conferences... 

If you have any questions or comments, let me know if the comments...

Start screen with two classes already created

Besides having the class name, the two classes also have a creation date below. I thought of this because teachers might teach the same class each year. The three buttons on the bottom are the action button, the add button and the trash button. Notice that I had no idea what the image of the class should look like so I left it a blank rectangle.

Prototype of start screen with one class already created

We realized the add button should be first so it was moved. Originally we thought that it would be awesome if the class was shrunk and when you selected the class if would zoom in and take up the entire screen. Then we realized that the animation would not work if you went to landscape mode so we went with the notebook theme for each class. Even though we could do the zooming effect with newer more powerful iPads, we wanted the App to work with older iPads as well.

Sketch of the class view

This was a breakthrough idea. We could create student cards that could be sorted in multiple ways. We believe that this visual sort of the cards would really help teachers.

Prototype of the class view

The idea of this view is that teacher can glance at her/his class and get information quickly.

The idea of the student card

My initial thought was that the card was sort of like a baseball card. It would have all the vital information about each student. You could add the student picture and they would be color coded so that teachers would know that it was time to conference with the student.