Challenge: Google Classroom lacks built-in support for IEP accommodations like custom lesson plans, accessibility tools, and progress tracking, making it harder for teachers to provide personalized learning for students with disabilities. 

*An IEP (Individualized Education Program) is a personalized plan developed for students with disabilities, specifying their unique educational goals, accommodations, and services required to support their learning.

Task: Design a solution to integrate IEPs into Google Classroom, enabling teachers to manage student accommodations and create inclusive, personalized learning experiences more easily. 

Interviews:

• • IEPs are often poorly written, failing to accurately reflect student needs, especially for marginalized students.

  • Many teachers lack proper training on IEPs, leading to inefficiencies and missed support opportunities.

  • Strong privacy protections make sharing IEP information difficult.

Site Visit:

• • Mixed IEP/non-IEP students with rotating teachers and paraprofessionals for varied needs.

  • Tech use is inconsistent, and schools struggle with limited funding and outdated materials.

  • IEP tracking is difficult, and accommodations aren’t fully integrated into the curriculum.

Online Forums

• • Teachers struggle with the complexity of managing IEPs and need better tools for support.

  • Educators want effective tools to track IEP goals and collect data on student progress.

  • Teachers like Google Classroom's interface but want features like student grouping and better IEP data tracking. 

We used our insights to move beyond identifying problems and began shaping actionable, user-friendly solutions for educators. Through an affinity mapping exercise, we organized key pain points into themes, helping us identify three priority areas to focus on in our design:

• IEP Overview: Teachers can view student IEPs summaries and apply accommodations.

• Progress Tracking: Teachers can generate reports, track grades, and monitor progress, with AI insights.

• Assignment Integration: IEP settings are applied directly to assignments for efficient accommodation management. 

While some IEP goals require in-person strategies, we focused on challenges that could be realistically addressed through a digital platform like Google Classroom and explored solutions tailored to those needs.

Conclusion: Integrating IEP management features into Google Classroom has the potential to significantly reduce administrative burden and improve support for students with disabilities. By centralizing goal tracking, accommodations, and progress monitoring within a familiar platform, the design enhances both accessibility and efficiency for educators. This streamlined approach empowers teachers to provide more consistent and personalized instruction. 

Future Improvements: This project was completed during the spring school semester. If I had more time, I would have liked to iterate on the prototype based on usability testing feedback.

Reflection: Throughout the course of this project, I gained valuable insights into both design and accessibility in educational technology. Here are four key things I learned: 

• How to translate user research into actionable design decisions that address real classroom challenges.

• The value of simplifying complex workflows to reduce cognitive load for busy educators.

• Techniques for integrating new features into existing platforms without disrupting the user experience.