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Keeping Track of Connections

Rather than focusing on providing a large amount of functionalities, this interface makes it easier for teachers to reach all parents by keeping track of their communication capabilities and limitations. After logging into her account, Tammy is taken to her home screen, where all of her contacts are organized with icons representing each of her students and their profiles.

Description: The primary purpose of this interface is to keep track of contact information and allow for communication across platforms. This contact display helps Tammy to track and manage the contact information of all of her students' families, which can be challenging with so many contacts and contact information that may change on a frequent basis.

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Initiating Contact

Action: Since she makes the most regular contact with students and not their parents, the display uses photo thumbnails of each student to help Tammy easily recall which correspondences need to be made. After  After identifying Sarah's picture, Tammy can hover her mouse over it. This causes a menu for the type of contact that needs to be made to appear. Because Tammy is concerned about Sarah's Midterm failure but the resolution will happen over time, she selects "Priority" as the kind of message she needs to send.

Description: There are three options for the urgency/importance of the correspondence Tammy would like to make. This is important because depending on a family's communication capabilities, their preferences may vary for the kind of contact they would like to receive at different times of day, for different kinds of messages, etc. Keeping track of the best ways to reach out to so many families in different situations (ranging from general updates to emergency situations) is made easier by letting CheckMark keep track of that information and only requiring Tammy to specify what her needs are for each correspondence.

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Communicating Across Platforms

Action: After selecting that she would like to send a priority-level message, a "New Message" form pops up on the same page. This enables Tammy to quickly make her correspondence with Busy Brenda and continue working on her tasks. The subject label if a convenient way for Tammy to keep track of her correspondence with Brenda when she reviews her messages or receives a reply from Busy Brenda. If Tammy records a message, she can play it back and/or delete it before pressing "Send." Once she sends her recording, CheckMark will place this message on a queue to be sent to Brenda's number within a template that allows Brenda to use her telephone keypad to play/save the message and even record a reply to be sent back to Tammy.

Description: Because Busy Brenda cannot afford to have internet access at home, her preferred method of communication is phone contact. Although Tammy is using her web browser to make her correspondence, she can use her computer's microphone to record 
to record a voice memo that will be sent to Brenda's phone. Additionally, because Brenda prefers not to be called during work hours unless it is urgent (not general or priority), CheckMark will store this message and not send it until after she gets off of work. That makes Tammy's job easier because they have very different work schedules. With this interface, she does not have to wait until Brenda can accept phone calls to contact her. In addition to sending all replies to her CheckMark message inbox, Tammy is able to specify in her settings that she would like to have replies sent to her email by default since she almost always has access to it. This makes the new message form pop up with the field already selected, although she may deselect it and/or select other reply destinations at any time.

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Staying Updated

Action: Brenda added an appointment through the Stream Scheduler.
Description: Tammy is notified that she should accompany her scheduled meeting with a message in the content stream. The “Add to calendar” button is a link to an .ics file

After Tammy sends her message to Brenda, a dialog appears on the same page informing her the message was successfully sent.

Description: Tammy can select "View," which closes the dialog box and automatically direct her to the message in her sent box that she just sent to Busy Brenda. She can also press "OK," which simply closes the dialog box and allows her to view her contacts again.

Tammy's message boxes organize all of her correspondences with parents, including contact initiated by her and contact intiated by parents. It provides one central location for all of the different kinds of contact that she may send and receive to reach out to all different kinds of parents (i.e.: voice recordings, emails, texts, etc.). This eliminates Tammy's need to have to keep track of many different devices and accounts, especially in times of high-stakes correspondence.