Bird by bird --- Evolution of my innovation idea!

I have been reading and searching about scaffolding struggling readers from various resources. I am planning to design a MOOC for in-service teachers so that they can help their struggling readers in class by using technology.

In this process of reading and seacrhing, I have noticed that there are many technological tools that teachers may use such as text-to-vocie, annotation, word definition, concept mapping tools; however, what is missing is that there is no comprehensive tool including all these "sub-tools". I mean learners need to use Google Docs for annotations, but e-books (epubs) for word definition. Therefore, I have decided to start bird by bird;)

I will design a tool including all useful scaffolding sub-tools by adapting one of my favorite games on the web. For now, I will not tell which game it is, keeping it as a suprise, but I am sure that learners would love it.

And, this tool will be one of the components of my MOOC (Here is the template). That is,  MOOC will try to teach in-service teachers how to use those scaffolding sub-tools which will be included in my comprehensive tool.

Observation would make a difference! Fingers crossed;)

In October, I will start volunteering in an after-school program in one of the middle schools in Athens. I will be attending literacy programs. I hope observing real classroom settings would bring me lots of different perspectives!

Maybe even I will be pilotting the prototype of my training platform/MOOC. Who knows?

Refinement of My Professional Development Platform

My research interests mainly focus on professional development and literacy education. After two meetings with my advisor, I decided to merge my interests!

That is, I will design a professional development platform or a MOOC for in-service teachers. This platform would help teachers to use some technologies effectively to scaffold struggling readers in their classes.

Struggling readers have tough time especially at middle and high schools because there is no literacy class in middle and high schools. Students don't learn to read, but read to learn there. That is why struggling readers have difficulties in their education because reading comprehension affects their academic achievement directly.

Taking these factors into account, I am planning to design a training module for in-service teachers to present some technologies that they can use while scaffolding struggling reaaders. 

First, the module may start with a diagnostic test. By answering questions, teachers may find what kind of specific problems such as lack of phonological awareness, decoding, etc. their students have. Afterwards, useful and practical technologies will be offered to them accordingly in the training module.

Through tutorials, teachers can learn how to use those tools on the training module. Then, they use them in real classroom settings and come back to the training module and reflect upon their use of technological tools.

These are (a little bit blurry) ideas in my mind for now!

My first LiveCode App :)

I designed a mobile app just for myself to help me to survive in the US!

The name of my app is "US Survival Kit". As I am from Turkey, we use different units for weight, height, distance, etc. I have been struggling in converting those units since I moved here. I was searching convertors on Google. Then, I asked myself "Why don't I develop an app for that?". And, the answer is below;)

A Great Motto!

I have just read a motto about interaction design in one of the chapters in Moggridge (2007, p. 735)'s book:

Evaluate early, often, and as late as possible!

Reference: 
Moggridge, B. (2007). Designing interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Authentic E-learning

Yesterday, we had our "Foundations" class with Dr. Reeves from COE. I have learnt a new concept there: Authentic E-learning. 

These are the principles of authentic learning:

• Provide authentic contexts that reflect the way the knowledge will be used in real life
• Provide authentic tasks
• Provide access to expert performances and the modeling of processes
• Provide multiple roles and perspectives
• Support collaborative construction of knowledge
• Promote reflection to enable abstractions to be formed
• Promote articulation to enable tacit knowledge to be made explicit
• Provide coaching and scaffolding by the mentor at critical times
• Provide for authentic assessment of learning seamlessly integrated within the tasks

(Reeves, personal communication, September 6, 2016)

After the class, I started thinking about how I can adapt authentic e-learning to
the online platform for professional development that I want to design.

A Lovely Afternoon at THINC

Based on my observations and experience, I assume that scaffolding struggling learners is a demanding and difficult process for teachers. However, this assumption just depends on my personal inference. Therefore, I need to come up with something more solid.

I think our visit to THINC gave us, as LDT doctoral students, that opportunity. We had the chance to be involved in the first steps in design thinking. It was fascinating for me. First of all, the THINC studio impacts you a lot when you enter through its gate. It is a well-organized design studio.

Thanks to Jared Bybee, we got involved in a real "field" work to complete the first phase of the design process: empathize. How we can redesign downtown Athens for the people spending some time there was our main question, so we went outside to the streets and talked to the people living in Athens.

It was a great experience for me. After those interviews on the streets, we went back to the studio to define the problems that Athens people have. We had various fruitful discussion and brainstorming sessions.

We tried to take (maybe) the first two steps in design thinking process last Monday afternoon: Empathize and define. However, we have many more to proceed: Ideate, Prototype, Test.

It was a short, but very effective visit that has helped to broaden our horizons!

The First Small Steps...

As I am a nine-year-experienced English teacher and a researcher interested in professional development, I prefer to benefit from my teaching experience and my sharings with my colleagues. Based on the ADDIE model (Dick & Carey, 1978), I have decided to design an online platform for teachers.

As a kindergarten English teacher, I remember having troubles in scaffolding the students who are slow learners and/or have some learning difficulties. Scaffolding in a second language was even much more difficult for me, but I suppose that it is not an easy process for teachers, though. Moreover, when I was a kindergarten English teacher, I was inexperienced because that was my first job, which made everything a little bit more complicated.

Another factor that made me have difficulties in scaffolding my students is that I learnt by-the-book rules and methods during my undergraduate years. All the recommendations or techniques written in the books are one-size-fits-all; however, within the years, I have learnt that each classroom context is different, and so are learners' needs.

I have concluded that there is a huge gap between the cases given in the books and the problems occurring in real life. Therefore, I am planning to design an online platform where both in-service and pre-service teachers can share their ideas.

Welcome to my blog!

Hi everyone,
I am a doctoral student in Learning,Design, and Technology program at UGA. I would like to share my design experiences in this lovely blog. Being interested in technology integration in language classes for years, I have decided to continue my scholarly journey in the LDT program because I have lots of questions regarding learning in my mind and I want to find or at least try to find their answers by doing research.

So far, I believe that I have been a qualified action researcher. I like observing my students, talking to them about the problems they experience, doing item analysis after each exam so that I am able to analyze my students' learning processes and problems. Since 2012, the date when I started to read about and attend trainings about educational technology, I have designed various technology-integrated activities and materials for my students. For my M.A. thesis, I implemented the flipped classroom model in my writing classes and designed six different version of video lectures.

In Turkey, I also used to give teacher training workshops about how to create technology-enhanced learning environments to my colleagues at conferences. I have been teaching English for nine years. Within this time period, I have had lots of meetings and discussions with my colleagues regarding the problems that we have experienced in our classes.

Therefore, in this new chapter of my life, I would like to focus on professional development and teacher training because I believe that we may change lots of elements in a learning environment through a well-designed professional development instruction for teachers.

So let the story begin!