What is Lello?
- An extended explanation
A looming mental health crisis among students has now become a state of emergency, especially due to many students being forced to stay at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. As much research has highlighted, student’s negative emotional states are not only a significant barrier to learning, but they also pose risks to their health and well-being.
In light of this difficult situation, we present ‘Lello!’ to the learning community!
Lello is the word that combines love and hello. As the name implies, it is a tool for members of the learning community (teachers, students, and parents) to greet each other with love. The goal of this app is to help create a loving environment in which users can provide emotional support to one another.
Lello will allow users to regularly monitor their emotional state and related life events, which will increase their emotional self-awareness and emotional resiliency. Periodic visual reports of aggregate emotional states are generated and shared with the learning community (optional), allowing for the understanding and monitoring of emotional trends as well as the identification of key events in each other’s life.
Problems that Lello addresses
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“Teachers, you will be able to relate to this a lot!”
– What teachers face in the real world
A single lecturer system is currently prevalent in most educational institutions around the world. Because teachers are responsible for multiple students at the same time, it is nearly impossible for them to look into and care about the lives of each individual student. In this system, many teachers face an insurmountable gap between their desire to care for students and the real-world challenges they face. Due to time constraints and their limited cognitive abilities, teachers’ focus tends to be skewed onto "troublemakers" who stand out. This not only makes teachers feel inept, but it also causes many 'appears to be fine' students to go unnoticed. However, school communities have been devoid of tools that will help overcome these limitations, and here is where the problems begin.
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Each student deserves to be cared – Your emotions matter to us!
An overflowing number of students are suffering from high levels of stress, anxiety, and even depression. This may even be true even for those who appear to be doing well in the classroom. Teachers and friends will never know if a depressed student successfully disguises themselves as fine, even if they desperately need emotional support to recover from their difficulties.
The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic along with the corresponding restrictive policies have resulted in many students reporting symptoms of prolonged and acute stress. Students who studied at home were deprived of personal peer interactions and a sense of belonging. A cold, hard monitor or a palm-sized screen served as their sole channel to talk to friends. Warm hugs and boisterous chatters in the classroom were deemed ‘dangerous.’ This unfamiliar form of learning environment caused students to feel disconnected from their peers and teachers, which - as no surprise - can lead to loneliness and frustration.
According to the statewide survey conducted by American Psychological Association in 2020, more than 2 in 5 teenagers (43%) said the level of stress in their life has increased over the past year. The majority of teens who are in school (81%) reported they have been negatively impacted due to school closures as a result of the pandemic, such as having less motivation (52%) and having a hard time concentrating on schoolwork (45%).
This is how Lello will assist you
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Self-Reporting user’s emotion and emotion analysis
A conscious approach to one's emotions improves one's ability to manage stress on one's own. In this app, students self-report their feelings by selecting the word from a list of 20 that best describes their current situation. Users rate the intensity of each emotion in percentile scores (e.g., Enjoyment & Pleasure – 80%, Worry & Fear – 30%). Students are then asked to choose keywords related to the emotional words they have chosen.
The diary menu (which is optional) follows, which allows users to elaborate on their daily events in several sentences more in-depth.
After data is accumulated for some while, visual analysis of the student's reported emotion is provided on a regular basis. As a form of the Geneva Emotion Wheel, a radar graph of cumulative emotion is created, as well as a word cloud image based on hashtags and a short diary. These self-reporting processes and weekly analysis reports are designed to help students visualize and be self-aware of their daily/weekly feelings, which is proven to enhance their emotional resiliency.
Teacher’s page – A student & classroom management tool
As previously stated, due to limited cognitive ability and time constraints, a single teacher is incapable of caring for a large number of students' emotions. To assist teachers, this app suggests two main features: 1) displaying individual and collective student emotions on the Emotion Wheel 2) Access to daily/weekly reports from students. Teachers can browse individual students’ emotion analysis in an intuitive graphical format, as well as the overall distribution of all students' status on the emotion wheel. This app can serve as a classroom management tool by directing the teacher's attention to the blind spot among a group of students using the “Overview” menu. With this app, teachers can readily pay close attention to a quiet and shy student's emotions, and introverted students can communicate with the teacher by telling the teacher how she/he is feeling today.
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