| Overall: | 18 | 4 |
| Design: | 6 | 2 |
| Navigation: | ||
| Usefulness: | 5 | 3 |
18
4
Teachers can enter assignments, exams, field trips, and general announcements. Teachers are able to attach files to each of these items - for example a worksheet for an assignment or a permission slip for a field trip.
Students and parents can visit the teacher's site to see what's going on for the day or use the calendar to see what's happened or what's coming up. Parents can also subscribe to a teacher's updates with Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar.
Usability
Site design
Whether or not you think Classroom Agenda is a good idea - if you think it's a good idea what do you think of the execution?
I like the concept of the site...but I had a few issues with it as well. The first was with the initial screen that tells me to 'try the demo'. You site's name is in that box as CLASSROOMAGENDA and it is difficult to read because there is no space (or varying color) between Classroom and Agenda.
Another issue is, that while I like the layout, it's quite big. Don't get me wrong, it displays nicely on my 1920x1200 monitor...but it didn't display that well on my 1280x1024 (and my parents still use 1024x768...). I would think that if you're targeting this towards students, you might also be targeting this towards their parents...and may want a more resolution friendly approach.
I did not like the sign-up page. While it was not asking for a lot of information...it just seemed out of place.
Another thing...on the pricing page, if I click the sign up for the free one it takes me to a non-HTTPS (non-secure) sign up sheet. However, if I click the sign-up link in the top-left, it takes me to a sign-in like Launchly's (which I prefer btw because then I don't need to make a new account). This needs to be standardized.
A couple other thoughts...could this be piloted to schools so that they could customize this with their own skins or something? Could a student add some 'flair' to their accounts - like a school logo or something like that? Does a teacher upload the assignments or is the student supposed to?
Like I said, I think you have a good idea here...just a few things need more work. Great start!
I don't normally do this, but before visiting Classroom Agenda, I read the other feedback. Your new homepage layout is nice. Good job.
The site is a neat idea, but I doubt any of the teachers I know would use this. For one, they are under paid and not likely to want to pay for this. I think you will need to approach it from the school district side. Another reason is the teachers I know are not "computer people". This is more work they will have to do every day that they have to pay for with little or no pay back.
Assuming the site is a good idea... here are some things I would fix:
You should offer the teacher an option to set a simple password on their content. That way an announcement like "johnny got first place" or something stays semi-private. It will also help ease those parents who are afraid of the internet.
On the "payment page", it makes no mention of what you are paying for and how much you will be charged.
You do not have a sitemap.xml file linked to in your robots.txt file, nor could I find one on your site. For SEO reasons, you should create one.
It appears you are going to allow google to index each of your teachers agenda's. Is this a good idea?
You need a better 404 page than the rails default. Preferably one with links back to your site.
Good luck!
I also think the concept is very cool. The tough questions is how to you reach the teachers/students. Are you going to approach schools and offer it to them? Are you going to try and market to the teachers/kids? I think it has the ability to grow viral if parents/teachers at different schools start talking about it.
I think the pricing is a bit strange to me. Is this 7$ a month for each student or teacher or both? I think 7$ is too much money from a student perspective. I would offer something like 5$ for every teacher and 1$ per student. In a classroom of 20 students you are looking at 25$ a month. Not a huge amount of money but every student would sign up and this would help spread the word. And if you start thinking about the number of classes and schools that $ amount could grow significantly. I think you need a few more tools for teachers/students as well. Talk to teachers and find out what they need, maybe allow students to submit their papers through your website. Then the teacher could grade them and email back the scores. Maybe you could have a tool for teachers that enables them to keep track of student's class grades and attendance. I think anyway to cut back on a teacher's paperwork would really help. You can allow parents to view attendance and grades anytime they want on every assignment real time. As a parent that is worth the 1$ a month fee. I would create a survey and go to a local school and ask teachers to fill it out which could provide you with more features to add to make it valuable.
The site is too big. Change the resolution to make is smaller. I also think you need to change your logo, it just all flows together. It is tough because your company name is so long but I would add agenda to the second line of your logo to save space. And remove the "dotcom" portion of it. This is unnecessary. Check out 99designs or CrowdSpring for some creative new logo designs. They will give you lots of great ideas.
I like the clean design. However, a lot of schools already have something in there corporation similar to this where you can see grade,etc. Most of them don't look as nice as this but some of the functionality is there. I think it has some potential if you add a couple of other features. Like one of the other reviewers stated, I think you would need to partner/sale to the school corporations. I definitely could work, but would be challenging to penetrate some school systems.
Seems like it will take A LOT to get this established. Might have to get out there in the real world, i.e. conferences and seminars and not rely as much on SEO and other online methods to get the word out. Definitely consider pouring in dollars into back to school campaigns. good luck
First impressions are that the site looks a bit... plain? I'm not sure if it's the logo/header or the color palette but something about it was a tad boring. I'm not a huge fan of your rotating/animated image either. It's distracting and depending on reading speed, hard to read. You're also just repeating the text (which is very verbose) that appears below it. I would suggest you reconsider this approach and maybe just have one static, impactful image with the three bullet points moved up and not rotating. I would also try very hard to condense those into a value proposition at the top of the page.
I would have left your page before I could have figured out what you were offering if I weren't trying to give you feedback.
The signup/pricing page needs a bit of help. You have a freemium model but the way you have it organized right now, it's very difficult to tell what the differences are in your plans. Also the header link was not functioning on this page so I didn't have a direct/easy path to the home page. I'll point you to the typical pricing page example over at Basecamp so you can see what I mean: http://basecamphq.com/signup
Their pricing page makes it really simple to see the differences. You could also try a tabular layout with check marks for what is included in the various plans.
The signup seemed confusing as well. Who needs to signup? After digging a bit it seems like only teachers need to. Maybe you should make that more clear.
On a similar note, what's the flow for how this is actually used? I struggled to find this. Is it true that only teachers sign up? What about students? Parents? How do students get to their teacher's agenda page? Can only teachers actually interact with the agenda and students/parents are basically read-only? I found that a bit confusing. I realize you have a demo so I was able to figure it out eventually but I shouldn't have to try a demo to get a feel for how it works. Maybe a simple work flow statement?
I played with the demo some. I found it a bit odd that all of the teacher's classes get lumped together. That seems like it would be inconvenient to the students who may only be in some of the teacher's classes. For example I went to the exams "tab" (more on that in a minute) and found that there were exams for multiple classes listed. I had to click "show" to see which exam was for what class which would suck if I was only in one of the teacher's five classes. I noticed on the home "tab" the classes are listed next to the assignments which is helpful but that information is lost on the other tabs. Again, maybe this should be split up by class?
I kept saying "tabs" above because your tabs do not visually change to let me know which section I'm viewing. They probably should to complete the effect.
I liked the calendar feature and that you didn't make the site overly cutesy.
I was somewhat confused when I switched to the teacher view. The tabs at the top didn't change but I was plopped down on some page with just a bunch of links. Following the links took me to pages similar to what I could get to at the top but with edit/delete/create links. IMO if you're logged in as a teacher you should just have the admin actions added to the same screen that a normal user sees (which is accessible from the tabs at the top instead of the settings screen). The way it is now if you click assignments at the top and you're a teacher (at least in the demo) you go to the student/parent assignments page with no admin functionality. I have no clue from there how to get back to the admin page (other than the back button). Oh wait, there's a settings link at the top. Still not a fan of how this is being done. I think it's fine to keep the profile/billing details in a separate place (settings in this case) but I would really like it if the teacher just used the same tabs/pages as everyone else but had their functionality (create, edit, delete) added on top of it.
As for whether this is a good idea or not, I'm not really sure. I think there is a LOT of competition in this field and you are probably going to have a tough time making a dent with the limited scope of your application as it stands today. Have you gotten "out of the building" and talked to any teachers? Would they use your service? Would they pay for your service? Get them to start paying now and you'll have your answer for whether it's a good idea or not.
Awesome - Thanks for the detailed feedback Brian.