Professor Garfield

Professor Garfield is a digital literacy tool and resource for K-5 educators. The website promotes the importance of students learning to be digitally literate and provides educators with interactive cross-curricular digital literacy activities for students.

Based on feedback from the education division of Viacom – Garfield’s new parent company – our project team conducted a language audit of the website to ensure the site would be more easily understood by young children. Additionally, our team redesigned the website homepage to place more emphasis on the eight components of digital literacy and the project’s relationship with Ball State University’s Teachers College.

Our project team also conducted two design thinking sessions with pre-service teachers in Ball State University's Teachers College. With the results from these sessions, we then developed 7 new interactive cross-curricular digital literacy activities for K-5 educators and students. This development process included creating user journey maps, writing scripts for each activity, shooting videos for each activity, editing the videos to add in b-roll or animations, and developing wireframe guides for website production.