Textbooks and Presentations enhanced through a hand held application for Students

User Centered design. . .

My class neighbor and I were discussing different problem groups within a school setting that we would like to design a technology to help them. I think that we have settled on the group of under achieving students whose needs are not being met in the regular classroom (this could include gifted students, students with learning difficulties or ESL students). Michele Jacobsen, our instructor, mentioned a feature on the pages of magazines which are being used to enhance the content of an article. You use a camera from a mobile device that you have and hold it over an icon and information gets displayed on the screen that is related to the material in the article.

I am just brainstorming here, but I think that you could use something similiar with a textbook. Say there is some content in a high school textbook that a student is struggling with, the student could use an application where the presence of an icon in the text or as part of a presentation allows the individual to access information that aids in there understanding of the material. The initial display could provide options for the student as to how they can be helped. For example three icons could appear: 1. "More"- enriching the content that has been presented, 2. "Help"- providing alternative explanations for the material that is presented. . . potentially touching on the different intelligences and 3. "Diagnose"- an application that would help the students recongize why that are not understanding the material being presented. Students would either be participating in a presentation during classtime or reading their text at home, they would encounter difficulties or would want to know more. Students would pull out their mobile device and hold it over an icon and boom, here is the help that they need to understand that content or provide greater insight into why they are not understanding the content. The development of an application like this would be a very large task and would require a very large design team with a large amount of funding. I do feel that an application like this will, if it has not already been done, help students and would truely be user centered.