About: Google Classroom is an online platform designed to help teachers manage and organize assignments, communications, and feedback in a digital space. It allows students to submit assignments, participate in discussions, and track their progress. The platform integrates with other Google tools, such as Docs and Drive, to streamline collaboration and enhance learning experiences. 

Problem: Google Classroom does not offer built-in features to fully support IEP accommodations, such as customized lesson plans, specific accessibility tools, or tracking of individual progress in accordance with the IEP goals. This limitation makes it challenging for educators to ensure personalized learning experiences for students with disabilities, potentially hindering their academic progress and inclusion in the digital classroom. 

*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.

Project Goal: The project goal is to design a solution that enhances accessibility in Google Classroom by integrating Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). This integration would allow teachers to seamlessly manage IEP information, ensuring personalized support for students with learning differences or disabilities. By doing so, teachers can easily create inclusive lesson plans and provide tailored accommodations, making Google Classroom a more effective tool for all students. 

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 explore integrating real-time notifications and AI-driven recommendations to support timely updates on student progress and accommodations.

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: 

• The importance of designing for inclusivity and ensuring that tools accommodate diverse learning needs.

• 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.