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"!