After reviewing the literature...

I have read lots of papers and book chapters on reflective practice, pre-service teacher education, and computer-based scaffolds. Today, we are supposed to bring our initial ideas about our design to the class. I am planning to design a portal for pre-service teachers. I just drew a storyboard of it. For now, it is a paper-based prototype!

My New Discovery :)

Here is my new discovery. It is book thumb holder. It is quite handy and practical. It works especially in crowded public transportation vehicles. It helped me a lot when I was in Istanbul, trying to read my book in the metro.

Hello again after a long time :)

I went back to Turkey in the winter break and came back with a fresh mind :) I had a chance to elaborate my research interests, and I have noticed that I am more interested in pre-service teacher education rather than in-service teacher education. More specifically, how to scaffold pre-service teachers to be reflective practitioners in a computer-based learning environment would be my focal point and main research question.

Nowadays, I am reading the related literature. I have learnt that online journals, e-portfolios, web templates, and visual scaffolds have been used to enhance both pre-service and in-service teachers' reflective thinking.

I would like to conduct a design-based study, and create my own computer-based environment that scaffolds pre-service teachers in the process of reflective thinking.

I haven't specified my subject matter area, yet. But most probably it will be in STEM. For now, it is better for me to proceed with boarder questions. During the literature review and prototyping, I hope I will narrow them down.

Feedback means everything for design!

As the LDT students, we have shared our innovation designs and provided feedback on each other's designs. I believe that feedback is so important to refine the design and make it more user-friendly for end-users.

I find my classmates' feedback invaluable because they show me different perspectives.

Especially, two comments have attracted my attention:

The first one belongs to my classmate Dan. She has suggested to insert some more visual aids into the hyperlinked texts that I provided on ReadJoy. I totally agree with her because I also believe that it would increase struggling readers' motivation. 

The second one is from Katie. She has recommended me to integrate or revisit the diagnostic test that I provide in the beginning of the MOOC to make the toolbar more personalized. I think it is a great idea because one of the affordances of digital scaffolding is that struggling readers can adjust it based on their needs. Thus, we should definitely utilize its merit by revisiting it. I agree with Katie.

As you see, my MVP is still evolving thanks to my friends' valuable feedback. Maybe the next step is a mini pilot study with end-users!

My MVP is evolving :)

After I prepared the five-minute video of my innovation artifact, I shared it with my classmates and got their feedback. Based on their valuable feedback, I have added some other features to my scaffolding toolbar.

By the way, I gave a name to it :ReadJoy :)

I have also designed a MOOC for the content area teachers who have struggling readers in their classes. This MOOC is based on TPAC framework, so it has three main components: Pedagogy of Scaffolding, Technology Integration into Scaffolding, and Hands-on Activities for Content Area Teachers.

Here are links for my innovation artifact:
https://youtu.be/YuTEknjDLOY
https://youtu.be/Nz8ejnmo3nU
https://youtu.be/PFqwT5K2sWE
https://youtu.be/yt_kIIMTlMw


Also, here comes a website for it: 
http://duyguumutlu.wixsite.com/readjoy

Please check it! I hope you enjoy :)

Good News!

I have started to design my innovation artifact 'bird by bird'. In the first step, I recorded a 5-minute video for my design, and it explains the first cycle of my design: Scaffolding Toolbar. 

I created a prototype of scaffolding toolbar for struggling readers in content area courses at middle schools. I inserted some specific tools to my toolbar: concept mapping to activate prior knowledge, highlighting to focus on main ideas, outlining to get the gist, text-to-speech to support readers who have insufficient phonemic awareness, dictionary to offer word definitions to struggling readers, translation for second language struggling readers, and annotation for note-taking.

Furthermore, I have integrated my toolbar into a gamified environment. This idea actually came from one of my favorite online games: Wikigame. In wikigame, players need to find the target final word by clicking on related words through hyperlinked texts. Similar to wikigame, I designed a sample hyperlinked text for the topic of 'Body' at seventh grade. I assume that this gamified environment would make struggling readers to read more and more! Fingers crossed ;)

Here is the video of my innovation artifact:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYEGNjVJjfY

Hope you enjoy it!

First Day in the After-School Program

Last Thursday, I started helping a teacher for literacy instruction in a middle school after-school program in Athens. There were about 10 students in the session, and I was there for one hour. Finally, I met my end-users ;)

The most important thing I noticed in such a short time is that the school gives a laptop to every student, and a reading instruction software program is installed in laptops. However, I heard a few students saying: "This program is so boring! I don't want to complete activities".

So, bird by bird, I have started to form my "end-user profile"!