Towards providing notifications to enhance teacher's awareness in the classroom

Students often need prompt feedback to make the best from the learning activities. Within classrooms, being aware of students' achievements and weaknesses can help teachers decide how to time feedback. However, they usually cannot easily assess student's progress. We present an approach to generate automated notifications that can enhance teacher's awareness in runtime. This paper formulates the theoretical framing and describes the technological infrastructure of a system that can help teachers orchestrate learning activities and monitor small groups in a multi-tabletop classroom. We define the design guidelines underpinning our system, which include: i) generating notifications from teacher-designed or AI-based sources; ii) enhancing teacher's awareness in the orchestration loop; iii) presenting both positive and negative notifications; iv) allowing teachers to tune the system; and v) providing a private teacher's user interface. Our approach aims to guide research on ways to generate notifications that can help teachers drive their attention and provide relevant feedback for small group learning activities in the classroom. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland