Teacher Dashboard. The landing page will initially take the teacher to the best reports for the assessments the teacher has recently administered. Moreover, the landing page will provide a teacher alerts on patterns and findings Beacon identifies in the teacher’s data. Administration and reporting on Performance Tasks: A user will be able to administer Performance Tasks paper/pencill. Assessment self-authoring tools: a teacher or school administrator will be able to create a custom assessment within the Beacon platform by selecting test items from an item bank. To assist in test creation, the bank will include information about each item such as CCSS alignment and DOK level.
Teacher Dashboard. According to Xxxxxxx Xxx (Few, 2007) a dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives, consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the informa- tion can be monitored at glance. Following the definition, the teacher dashboard provides a teacher with the possibility to observe learning activities on individual and class level, allowing the teacher to intervene when necessary. Such learn- ing analytics dashboards have proven to be useful and effective for teachers in many settings (Xxxxxxx et al., 2013). We plan to build teacher dashboards from portable apps implementing OpenSo- cial and ActivityStreams specifications (Vozniuk, Xxxxxxxx, & Xxxxxx, 2013). For instance, one app could be used to show how many students are currently at each phase of the inquiry cycle, another app could display average time spent on each task (scenario LA-2). When several widgets are organised as a dash- board, such a dashboard can be exported as an app itself. This app consisting of other apps is called a metawidget (Blattner, Xxxxxxx, Xxxxx, & Xxxxxx, 1992). When bundling a dashboard as a metawidget, it becomes portable and can be deployed and ran on any learning platform implementing OpenSocial and Activ- ityStreams specifications. Once built, such a dashboard can be customised and reused in multiple ILSs. To encourage reuse and customisation of teacher dashboards by other teachers, both dashboards metawidgets and individual apps will be shared on the lab repository.
Teacher Dashboard. The platform is fully searchable from the dashboard using the search bar. This will return results for students, groups & GLPs. Many areas of the UI are accessible from the dashboard using the dedicated shortcut buttons to areas such as ‘active lesson plans’ and ‘classroom student overview’. Communication is an important aspect in Beaconing between teacher and student. Although in many cases schools and institutions will be using their own dedicated forms of communication, Beaconing aims to provide an interactive discussion forum and basic instant chat window to aid productivity and creativity. This can be accessed via the ‘Forum’ button on the navbar, which includes buttons to all other areas and functionality of the UI. (see Appendix B)
