Awareness Tools for Teachers to Support Students’ Exploratory Learning: Challenges and Design

Abstract

This chapter discusses providing teachers with real-time awareness tools to support their use of exploratory learning systems in the classroom. We present the challenges involved in designing meaningful awareness tools for teachers. We discuss a design approach that involves teachers in iterative participatory activities so as to formulate key usage scenarios for the tools. Teachers also collaborate in the design and evaluation of the tools, and in identifying meaningful interaction indicators that should be detected by the system as students are working on exploratory learning tasks and notified to the teacher. The approach, methodology and methods reviewed here have been developed in the context of designing a suite of Teacher Assistance tools for a mathematical microworld. However, we argue that they have the potential to be applied more generally to the design of teachers’ awareness tools for other exploratory learning contexts, not only for classroom-based but for also distance and mobile exploratory learning.