A challenge for many of today’s educators is working in an environment where their students are more computer savvy, adept at online research, and connected on social media than they are. Yet teachers are still charged with educating their classes on digital media literacy to make sense of today’s world. If the curriculum is adeptly taught, students develop the skills necessary to analyze, interpret, and accurately comprehend the online content they consume. 

To support teachers in keeping their digital media literacy skills sharp, Bay Area public media organization KQED envisioned an online network where educators stay abreast of current technological trends, find support for developing their teaching skills, run ideas through a network of peers, and learn the apps students are natively comfortable with.

Partnering with Marker Seven to bring this vision to life, KQED launched the Teach platform in 2018.

Our Role

When Marker Seven embarked on the project, we developed an in-depth product plan to meet KQED’s vision. The primary concepts were:

• Provide courses and training for teachers
• Create a safe space for thought sharing
• Share knowledge throughout the platform
• Comment/discuss on other colleagues’ work 

We then worked with the KQED team to go through our full digital product workflow including Discovery, UX, Visual Design, and Development to implement the project.

Outcome

With a well-planned and meticulously designed UI, new users were able to easily familiarize themselves with the system, and even enjoy the process of launching their teaching careers into the digital space.

The product is built on a robust and solid application foundation. This means secure, fast loading pages; real-time information; and the ability for user to interact with one another.

KQED’s Teach platform provides a professional online learning space that offers a truly social approach to enhancing digital media literacy skills. For today’s teachers, access to mainstream technology, and the ability to successfully guide the next generation of students, is now within reach.