Changing Project and Job Aid Topics

Hi,

Our team was working on the first grade teacher's uses of play-based method to facilitate students' transaction from kindergarten to first grade. However, we did not access enough teachers to interview. Therefore, with the recommendation of Dr. Glazewski, we have decided to focus on public speaking.

Job Aid Topic

Before the class on Monday, I has three topic on my job aids. First of them was "how to withdraw from an bank ATM?" Dr. Glazewski told me that this topic is not appropriate because everyone know how to withdraw. The second one was "how to effectively use body language during public speaking?" This topic is so broad. There are many kinds of body language to use within public speaking so I am not going to use this topic, either. The last one was "how to format a harddrive?" Dr. Glazewski more like this topic and she recommended me to enhance the topic with some additional points. Regarding her recommendation, I will also add "how to create partitions" to my topic. I hope I will achieve a good job with my job aids.

Thanks,

Best,

Remzi

Introduction to Web Design

Hi,

This week I wanted to start learning web design from lynda.com. Actually, when I was an undergraduate student, I was good at web design. I voluntarily created a professional website with two of my friends. These days, this website, http://www.aked.org.tr, is going to be changed, but we designed the first form of that website. While we were creating the website, we used PHP. I can say that I am still good at web design but I wanted to start from a basic form of web design program, HTML. I believe that it will be very helpful for me to make a framework any of my websites in the future. HTML videos helped me to explore a new software which I can edit, test , and compile my website. This software is "KOMODO EDIT 7." It is free and very useful. Actually, Dreamweaver is also helpful for this goal but Komodo edit can be another good choice.

Thanks,

Remzi

Project Proposal

Hi,

This week, our comedy group team has concentrated on preparing project proposal based on Dr. Glazewzski's recommendation from the meeting we had with her on Monday. After Monday, we had several meetings to discuss the proposal. We are first going to describe the planned intervention. We are going to define our purpose and our project objectives. Our purpose is to help first grade teachers to create and use play-based activities. Our context will include Web Based Learning Platform,  instructional videos, written instructions, and opportunities for teachers to report their experiences implementing the activities. We are going to create short videos (1-5 minutes) based on Winn's principles of message design. Website content will not include a lot of text and still images. 

The objective of such  is to increase active student engagement. We can measure student engagement by observing students' mental attention to a learning subject or by a physical activity.The physical activity makes easier to observe and measure the levels of engagement immediately. Students in Indiana public school have difficulties for transition from kindergarten to third grade. This transition can be especially difficult for students more used to learning through play-based activities. Therefore, we hope to help and encourage teachers for these reasons. 

Thanks,

Remzi

Importance of Motivation

Hi,

After last week, we decided to interview 3-5 first grade teachers. Therefore, I started looking for some first grade teachers around Bloomington. I have collected more than 20 first grade teachers email addresses. I am planning to email them before Monday because I want them to read their emails when they go to their school on Monday. Megan wrote a letter for us to request teachers for interviews. In our project we are going to ask some questions to first grade teachers. These question will be related to description of their teaching strategies, description of difficulties for students' transitions to first grade, students' adaptations, integration of play in teaching methods, types of play resources.

Actually, after class in last week, I completely believe that our groups' motivation is adequate for this project. The audio record we prepared in a short certain time to show Dr. Glazewski why snow can be nice made me really happy. My all group members spent much more effort for that. I am proud of them. So, I can say that my team's motivation is good. On the other hand, we also need to motivate teachers first to accept our request for interview. I hope that our letter will make them excited to participate in our project. For this we need to convince them to believe that there is a relationship between their curriculum and our project. also, they need to trust us. Confidence is the most important elements of an interview. If they trust us, they will help us with the all stage of our project. We are planning to satisfy our target audience because we believe that if the will satisfy with our project, we will satisfy, too.

I hope everything will go well.

Thanks,

Remzi

Lynda.com

Hi,

I have been visiting lynda.com for years. When I was an undergraduate student in Turkey, some of my friends and I was using some licensed lynda videos to improve our skills of uses some software, such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, and Autocad. After I came here, I took some courses on Adobe Photoshop form IT Training Service in Herman Wells Library. Someone taught us how to effectively use Photoshop. They used the infromation from lynda.com. Therefore, I really used to visit lynda.com.

These days, I started visiting lynda.com to watch videos about statistics. I tranferred Y502 course from my master. This course is about foundational statistics. I want to study the terms that I have learned before. I watched some videos from lynda.com. I think it will be very useful and helpful for me to repeat everything. The best thing that I have realized about lynda.com videos is that they provide us some documents to follow videos and doing practice while watching the videos.

Best,

Remzi