McFerren Resume
Teachade - Founder, User Interface-Experience Designer
www.teachade.com
Miami, FL - Cambridge, MA
7/04 - 7/07
* Designed User Interface and User Experience for a K-12 education portal - took an initial vision from strategy to scope to structure to skeleton to surface
* Performed thorough research of the competitive landscape and all existing functionality/experiences
* Heavily involved with school purchasing of digital content & I performed frequent teacher interviews at our private test school and at teacher conferences throughout the nation
* Developed the scope of the site with regard to functional specifications and content requirements
* Developed the site's structure and articulated how these variables were bridged together:
* Different types of teachers (subjects/grades interests) and their longtail
* Different types of resources (learning resources , assessments, ect) and their priorities
* Different stakeholders (teachers, parents, students, administrators, vendors, etc..) & their values
* Wire-framed the site's skeleton and produced interface design, navigation design & information design
* Translated user feedback into page mockups, component listings, site maps, statements of work, and version specs for each iteration of the website's surface
* Contemplated variables to uncover the business model behind the website
Teachade – Founder, Product Manager
www.teachade.com
Miami, FL – Cambridge, MA
7/04 - 7/07
* Project Managed contractors located in Miami, Sacramento, Cambridge, & India through alpha and beta development phases of an educator web portal where teachers share resources ($900,000)
* Identified and documented project requirements from user data, industry research, web investigation, school purchasing, interviews and surveys gathered at over 20 education technology trade shows, and parent/teacher/student interviews at our test school located on Fisher Island
* Translated project requirements into version specs and statements of work, complete with site maps, mock ups, and thorough explanations of functionality requirements
* Negotiated pricing structure, hourly rate, and time lines for each version/iteration with web contractors
* Quality managed production throughout the entire development phase of each version based on initial
statement of work
* Identified bugs during pre-release of each version and logged them into Bugzilla for the developers to fix
* Met spec requirements within listed time frames
Teachade – Founder, Content Development
www.teachade.com
Miami, FL – Cambridge, MA
7/04 – 7/07
* Project Managed Content Procurement & Production of over 200,000 web-based teacher resources
* Managed 30 paid teachers responsible for resource collection and tagging by subject, grade, and topic
* Managed 10 teachers on a project to produce 10 flash-based multimedia games ($40,000)
* Gathered vision and story boards from participating teachers
* Translated teacher direction into a statement of work, complete with game mapping and user-
interface navigation
* Negotiated hourly rates and time allocation with multimedia agencies
* Quality managed production throughout the entire development phase of each version based on initial statement of work
* Identified bugs during pre-release of each version and logged them into Bugzilla for the
developers to fix
* Met spec requirements within listed time frames
* Managed content translation and tagging of over 500 flash-based learning games with an Indian web publishing company ($120,000)
* Revised scripts of flash-based learning resources (Rupees to Dollars, Cricket to Baseball, etc...)
* Selected voice-over talent
* Identified bugs during pre-release of each version and logged them into Bugzilla for the developers to fix
* Met spec requirements within listed time frames
* Tagged each resource by pre-established subject, grade, topic directory structure and batch loaded them
onto portal
* Recruited 5,000 community users from online forums, teacher conferences, & focus groups
* Traveled extensively to national teacher conferenences and trade shows to represent the teachade
product, recruit teachers, court vendor participation, and gather feedback/requirements for future site
improvements
Thanks plamb
Thanks so much for your response and encouragement - It truly means a lot!
To respond to a few from your quick pass:
1. When a teacher posts a relevant resource on her calendar, she has a choice to keep it private or make it public and share it with the community. If she chooses to go public with her posted resource, she is required to tag it with a fixed selection subjects, grades, and topics. Upon registration, each teacher declares her subject, grade, and topic interest (as well as their zip). Those teachers who share the same subject, grade, and topic interest as the newly posted, public resource, may see that particular resource at the top of their "what's new" inbox on the day that it is scheduled. If a teacher finds a useful resource from her "what's new" inbox, she is free to drag and drop it (from right to left) into her own classroom calendar. Technically speaking, we keep track of parent data so that we know how many calendars that the original resource is posted on (in total and for any particular day). If the site becomes popular, we may have significant amount of resources posted each day - the "what's new" inbox will be overflowing, even for each longtail niche among subject/grade interest combinations. How do we vet this? Well...each day, we rank a resource in the "what's new" inbox by 1) how many calendars it is posted on today 2) how many calendars the resource is posted on in general. By doing so, we can give the user a glimpse of the most popular/recent (and relevant) resources scheduled on calendars throughout the site. The key to this is that we want to do as much as we can for the teachers yet allow them to customize appropriatly. In order to start the engine, we plan to offer registrants the option of prefilling their calendar's with a year long list of scheduled resources or the option of letting them start from scratch. If a user chooses the prefill option, a teacher is free to customize her calendar by reordering topic folders (full of relevant resources) by week or a teacher is free to customize her calendar by reordering specific resources on specific days. The end result is a daily email (or facebook/myspace message) that goes home to students and parents at 3:00. In this email is an agregation of all the posted resources from each classroom that a parent or student subscribes to.
If you get a chance, please check out my working website: www.mysyllabi.org
2. You're probably right about the $2 million but it seems that there is some sort of negotiation if an idea is selected. From looking at last year's prizes, all the winners didn't receive very round numbers. The aim with the $2 million dollar number is to spend $1million on building the site and staff the team, then spend the other $1 million on sponsoring teachers to use the site. All ad $ from the site goes to the teacher users ("adopt-a-teacher" and reward them based on consumption rates of their parents and students). Our business model is to sell administrative rights to school principals so that they can have control over sensitive email between their faulty and their parents and students. We'd like to incoporate regular email functionality into the system so that we can tap into a budget for a product that schools are already paying for. I hope things work out!
Whats New Page:
Project comments & suggestions
McFerren: Some thoughts after a quick pass...
1) The Big Idea: I really like the idea of attaching relevant content to a shareable calendar. It seems to be an easy and practical way to organize your offerings. that said, not clear on how you would both vet curricula materials for quality and provide them in a way that is both grade level and location relevant? Having people pull from each others calendar sounds a bit convoluted, but no doubt you have a technical solution to the challenge of easy identfication and sharing of appropriate materials?
2) Practicality: You might consider separating the two projects and just choose 1? $2 Million is alot of clams considering the prize money is only $5 Million total. I would consider downsizing if at all possible.
Overall I think it is a solid idea and one worth submitting!