Scholastic Teachers
Calendar App
Product Summary
A teacher-centered calendar app that supports discovery and scheduling of high quality, seasonally-relevant educational activities from the existing Scholastic asset library.
USER GOAL Elementary school teachers need an efficient way to plan activities throughout the year, so that they can create a great learning experience for students that is relevant to seasonal events.
BUSINESS GOAL Provide a new method to make it easy for teachers to discover and make use of content in the company’s vast library of assets.
Details
COMPANY Scholastic
MY ROLE Product Designer
TEAM SIZE 1 designer (me)
TIMELINE about two weeks
MY RESPONSIBILITIES product discovery, pitching to stakeholders
Context
As a freelance designer at Scholastic Education, I had a little down time when the project I’d been working on was cancelled. My boss asked me to create a calendar app for teachers. I wasn’t given any more direction than that.
Process
I only had about two weeks, so my process on this project was very short!
I performed some quick market research on what teachers need to keep track of.
Those things included:
holidays throughout the year, both the vacation kind and the kind that offer opportunities for formal learning
school-specific obligations like PTA meetings, fundraisers, and events like field day
curriculum planning and lesson scheduling
I considered the business’ unique strengths, as well as goals
Scholastic has been serving teachers since 1920. They have a deep library of high quality activities, articles, and other classroom-ready assets.
Synthesis ⚡️
I started to browse Pinterest to see how teachers use calendars in the classroom. All of a sudden it hit me! Teachers LOVE Pinterest. It’s a very visual tool to save and collect ideas!
Why not create a calendar app that has some of the same features teachers love about Pinterest?
Pinterest functionality
+ Scholastic content, in handy chronological order
At least one classroom-ready idea provided for every single day of the year.
Every idea is populated with existing content from Scholastic’s trusted library. Over on Pinterest, content hasn’t been vetted by anyone. Here on the Scholastic Calendar App, all content is already copyedited and fact checked!
‘My Calendar’ includes your saves AND your school’s events
Scholastic teacher logins are already associated with the school they teach at. This makes it easy to create a separate back end for school admins to add school-specific events like fundraisers, standardized test dates, open houses, and parent / teacher meetings. No need for teachers to add all those things manually!
Teachers can save ideas where it makes sense for them
Some teachers would want to save this to Martin Luther King Day in January, while others would save it in Black History Month, or another time in the school year. Saving to Loose Pins allows users to keep ideas unsorted, if that’s what they prefer.
Results
Scholastic loved the idea! My boss asked me to present it to the division’s VP. Then she wanted me to show it to the group SVP! It opened up doors for me to speak with high level stakeholders.
Despite stakeholder enthusiasm for this new business opportunity, the development pipeline was already very full. It wasn’t possible to squeeze this project into the schedule.
TAKE AWAY: Thinking about an audience’s desires or goals in addition to their needs can lead you to some innovative ideas! It’s also helpful to think about how an organization’s existing assets can be put to use as a service. Sometimes the secret to innovation is combining proven concepts in a brand new way!