Rand McNally
Users can access more than 100 screens of educational information from the Online User Guide home screen.
An overview of Rand McNally Classroom features are offered in the Classroom Tour video.
The Curriculum Integration section offers helpful tools for creating lesson plans in Social Studies, Literacy, Math, Science, and 21st Century Skills.
The Click-by-Click section offers a full breakdown of each content area in Rand McNally Classroom.
Educating teachers is at the heart of this robust e-learning tool designed to showcase the features of Rand McNally’s award-winning K-12 product, Rand McNally Classroom.
For more than 130 years, Rand McNally has been opening classrooms to the world with Geography-based educational products that give students a lifelong foundation of geographic literacy and teachers the resources, materials, and guidance they need to enrich the learning experience. The Rand McNally interactive team asked Mightybytes to create an online user guide to help educators understand all the features and tools available in the company’s web-based learning resource, Rand McNally Classroom.
OUR APPROACH
The online and editorial teams at Rand McNally already had a clear idea what information they wanted to present in the user guide, but needed a solid structure around which to build it. Extensive discussions on information architecture and user experience helped us organize that information into an easy-to-understand framework. Once the IA and UX tasks were completed, we created a detailed interactive script that inventoried media assets and served as the driving force for both narration and on-screen visuals.
For this project we provided the following services:
- Script writing and development
- Art direction and design
- Motion graphics and animation
- Original music composition and sound effects
- Flash, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
- A whole slew of testing and debugging across systems, browsers, and platforms
IMPLEMENTATION
Interface designs were driven primarily by existing standards set by the Rand McNally Classroom product. Since brand identity guidelines were clearly defined up front, we focused our design efforts on defining user interactions and educational goals for all primary content sections within the existing Rand McNally Classroom navigation structure. Once designs were complete we built the user guide framework using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
With the overall structure in place, we recorded voiceover narration and created step-by-step click-through tutorials based on the script and content sections. An animated introductory video served to highlight key features and benefits of the Rand McNally Classroom product. As the full structure of this online learning tool took shape we tested it across multiple platforms and browsers to insure feature parity for all users.
Overall, this project took about eight months to complete. We used a variety of tools, including Adobe Captivate, Flash, and After Effects as well as Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Logic Studio to create content that met educational goals. With over 100 screens of information and dozens of audiovisual elements, the Rand McNally Classroom user guide and tutorial was well-suited to Mightybytes’ multidisciplinary approach.
THE RETURN
Rand McNally Classroom won several prestigious industry awards and the online tutorial and user guide that Mightybytes created has helped countless teachers better integrate Geography-based concepts and ideas into multiple subjects, including Math, Science, Literacy and Social Studies. Mightybytes also created a variety of interactive history maps and a DVD demo disc for promoting the Rand McNally Classroom product.