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"The impact of design thinking in education is two-fold: First, by requiring the use of multiple lenses when looking at a problem, design thinking demonstrates that bringing together seemingly disparate perspectives can often be the key to finding effective solutions.Second, and perhaps more importantly, design thinking emphasizes that collaboration and the use of outside resources are critical to both the learning and problem solving process-a notion that will be valuable to their scholarly, professional and personal lives."

The real world problem: Burning of waste tyres pollutes the environment Solution: Encouraging people to recyle tyres tu use them for production of furniture. It is a real example of project based on design thinking for change that children drive in their communities.

It is very meaningful to see how children engage in problems and be creative to solve them. Educators should not limit students' minds into some patterns. They can create their own learning environments if they are encouraged and guided.

Thank you for sharing an application of design thinking with us Elanur Hoca.

Famous article by Nicolas Carr. What do you think?

I like these sentences from the text: "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.". Because the way we read has changed with new strategies(scanning and scimming quickly) and a great deal of information. That's why we rather google it then reading hundreds of pages.(Or ctrl-f works pretty good in some cases:)) However, I do not think that we are getting more stupid. Our brain has been evolving with new technologies and habits and probably will keep doing that. So we are not so much eager to keep some information in our minds since we are sure that we can reach them anywhere anytime. For instance, children no longer memorize multiplying tables but it does not tell us that they can not solve multiplication problems.They have another instruments to save time and energy :)

I agree with the ideas of Afra and Sinem. Sometimes I experience this while reading articles for my thesis and I have to write the key points for myself. However, I believe that we are not getting stupid, because we are now in technology era. We cannot abstain from appyling google for any information. It is really cost-effective in terms of time and money. I think that we will have to face with more new technologies in future, but this cannot mean that we will get more stupid. It is the requirement of our era we live in and we have to adapt ourselves.

This is an article by Chris Dede (Harvard Graduate School of Education August, 2004). It focuses on the importance and difficulties of DBR. You can get help from this article, while trying to answer the questions on LMS.

There was a case in one of the articles, the researchers were asked to provide an example of their research findings which helped them to solve a problem in practice and they were silent. It is a really good example of the gap between research and practice.When I think that research findings will not help to solve problems in the field, I start to question the things I am doing because being a part of the solution, not the problem" was the starting point of my academic life...

I really like the idea offered by DBR that is against the highly controlled laboratory settings are settings that research settings resembling that. But I still can not grasp how multi number of variables can healthly or in a valid sense can be studied all together in DBR. Maybe the local issue gains importance at this point.

This is a new article by Mary C. English and Anastasia Kitsantas from the Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem- Based Learning. What do you think about including self-regulated learning in problem based learning?

it seems that we will try to go to some Chinese Universities in ten years time, instead of Europe or States.

In my opinion education policy of the countries do not be planned based on the students' academic achievement. Real achievement of an education system could be observed as individuals' adaptation to life. For example the main vision of the elementary science curriculum defined by Ministry of National Education of Turkey [MONE] (2005) is that regardless of the individual differences of students, they are educated to become scientifically literate, the uniqueness nature of the learner; background and culture of the learners and motivation of the learners were taken into consideration in the development of the curriculum (MONE, 2005), but putting those in the practice is very difficult.

Also, as mentioned in the text "… those results come at the cost of one of the highest levels of student anxiety in the world." Anxiety is very important and big research area in educational psychology also the news in the link http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-04/10/content_9710997.htm exemplifies its importance in Chinese case.

I am curious about what you think on this. Do you agree?

While reading I felt that the author is somewhat close to new ideas coming from other people, other thinkers, actually coming from the rest of the world. I mean as I understood at some parts, he is not open to accept the judgements or theories of some thinkers because what they said were already out there, they did not bring anything new. However I would name these people as men of action and thinkers ahead of their time. Because they draw attention to critical points that were ignored or missed by others. Maybe yes what they put forth were already out there or maybe some of their methods are not sufficient compared to our current methodologies but still they were the ones to see the complete picture and summarize things.

Thank you Evrim Hocam:) I strongly believe in community, wikinomy, we have to share, we can learn from each other in an informal environment but social constructivism is not working on me:) As he wrote "At University I learned almost everything in the quiet of my own room and the library. In corporate life, I relished the opportunity to learn on trains and planes, havens of forced isolation, peace and quiet. To this day I blog a lot and enjoy periods of intense research, reading and writing. It's not that I've learned everything in these contexts, only that they go against the idea that all learning needs to be social." I always got successful with deliberate practice and with "Learning by Doing". I don't like social media as well, there are many damages than benefits and I'm not so introvert, maybe a little:) but it's not about being introvert or extrovert, it's about talking or doing... I want to tell a real story of my friend who was a novice programmer in a company. There were many experts, novices and they were taking courses, online, offline, with collaboration every time. Everybody were sharing, commenting, discussing but he began a real life project first week by himself and after 6 month they were still asking to each other but he finished his project. After one year he was the best programmer in the company. And everyone began to ask to him. I asked him, he told that he believes in working until suffering and just doing:) And he added this interesting sentence "You will learn and you will be successful when you will be so related, so suffering that one day you will see dreams and solve problems about the topics in your sleep" My friend's opinions are maybe a little bit dramatic but I believe in "doing" too, at least it's working for us:)

David Perkins has conducted long-term programs of research and development in the areas of teaching and learning for understanding, creativity, problem-solving and reasoning in the arts, sciences, and everyday life. He has also studied the role of educational technologies in teaching and learning and has designed learning structures and strategies in organizations to facilitate personal and organizational understanding and intelligence. His inquiries reflect a conception of mind that emphasizes the interlocking relationships among thinking, learning, and understanding. The three depend deeply on one another. Meaningful learning aims at understanding and depends on thinking with and about what one is learning. Effective thinking in the subject matters and in general involves understanding the resources of the mind and learning to deploy them sensitively and systematically

TeachLive of the University of Central Florida is a virtual platform that the teachers can test out their classroom management skills before going up on the "big stage". What it basically does is to place a teacher-in-training in a virtual classroom populated by computer-generated students. A Skype conference call and a Microsoft Kinect motion sensor power the high-tech pantomiming behind the platform. It's currently being used at more than 80 campuses across the U.S. to train some of the next generation of educators, and it appears to be working.

Very interesting. I was thinking for a similar program for training clinical psychologists. Looks like it'll be a thing in the coming years.

This is a very useful platform, I think. Pre-service teachers are facing some problems at classroom management. I always think it is absurd to give classroom management lesson at theoretical and that is the best way to teach teacher candidated.

You can take a look (a free version for teachers and parents)

This tutor provides only practice opportunities for students but I am not sure that whether it includes problem solving context

I reallu like this application. Students can learn both geometri and how they can draw their way not to crash some objects. But The sam question came my mindwith Filiz, is this develop higher order thinking skills?

Augmented Reality Goggles for Snow Sports! Its amazing :)

Selcuk you are right but it is still very expensive to use it. on the other hand, such as in Football, Soccer, Ice hokey money is not a big problem for federations and they can find a lot of sponsors about it. That is why i believe in a short time they will start to use these kind of augmented reality features to make sports much better.

Maybe after federations start to use and these application become widespread, the personal model of those can be produced at cheaper price. However, I agree with you, price is one the biggest problem at that sector.

This article presents how much CTS improves the abstract reasoning component of word problem solving in Math. Abstract subtests were not as easy as concrete components. It leads me think again of deep learning with CTS. It is really controversial topic.

A nice example of learning by design.

A very good example :-)) I think this supports the idea that projects should have an aim and provide possible solutions to existing problems. As we all know, necessity is the mother of invention. So when we want to engage sts with design activities, we should be realistic and provide them with problems from real life.

This excerpt is taken from the book "The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education" Game-based learning have been increasingly used in educational settings in the last 10 years and there is a lot of research on this subject. I wonder if there is any on game-based learning how experts and novices solve certain problems in the game environments. Sounds a promising research area.

The example of Making sale in differentiating novices and experts is stunning.While novices focus on making the sale , experts develop relationships. The former aims to think, organize information for a limited time for that thing only.However the latter thinks more elaboratelly, develop ways for a long period of time for future connections which is wiser.Thus, we can see that experts know how to use their long term memory effectively compared to novices.

This link contains a small writing of Roy Pea, learning sciences pioneer. Putting on emphasis on the guidelines of mathematical education it also shares some ideas on how to use technology for mathamatic teaching. I find it interesting that although this is a 31-year-old document, ideas about teaching is quite up-to-date. Article contains ideas on the aim of the mathematical education which is to nurture problem solving skills and suggests softwares should be harmonious with this fact instead of drill and practice softwares.

En büyük sorun itibar kaybı :(

Teachers are the ones we always put blame on!!! They don't prepare students very well for the university entrance exam, they don't implement the curriculum effectively, they resist innovation, changes etc. In Turkey, teaching is mostly a profession of last choice. Losing reputation is not a problem, it is a result. Restoring it can not be done by increase in wages, providing facilities for them etc. When education becomes a prior area for all of us, teacher's reputation will be restored then, I think.

1. The purpose of this paper is to share reflections of the three authors on the process of instructional design and implementation of blended learning for teachers' professional development (PD) in rural western Kenya. 2. There are for different reserach questions but one of them is caught my attention as we have the same problem in our country I think; How appropriate is blended learning for teachers in a rural setting? 3. The design-based research methodology in the study comprised a number of research methods. The methods included ethnographic observations, qualitative interviews, narratives and documentation of design artifacts

The article has talked about the importance of communication with parents for learning as well as what problems we as educators may confront with by asking parents to help their children in order to enhance learning.

Thanks for sharing this:) Actually, it is not only important but also vital to include parental communication into education procedure. I think school, parents and the student himself/herself compose the core family in education process rather than the biological family of the student. In the literature about this issue, it has been put forward that there is a positive relation between parental communication and student learning or achievement both academically and psychologically.

One of the most difficult tasks that educators are to achieve is ensuring positive parental involvement in education. As parents are very sensitive about their children's education, nowadays most of the teachers have difficulty to create fruitful communication with parents. Parents question and crticize everything at school as they do not have confidence in educators because of improper practices they experienced or witnessed. Having training sessions, meetings and home visits can be useful in this framework. In this way, parents will be informed about the activities at school and can be involved in decision making process which will change their perceptions in a positive way.