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It is really impressive TPACK model example that can help students learning geography. By teacher's high CK, students learn similarity and differences between continents and countries. By teacher's high PK, students are seperated groups and they are leaded in order to develop good questions. Also, by teacher's high TK, students are connected to real students in different countries in real time via using techology, so all of the students work collaboratively.

Büşra, I really love it <3 And also ıt is so funny practice to use TPACK model.

I really liked it. It is fun for students but there is more than that I believe. Because in the process they are comparing other students' clues with what they know, reviewing high amount of their information. For example students at the other side of the skype call knew their friends were not in finland, estonia, latvia, belarus, ukraine, etc (neighbors of russia). But still I think they -maybe implicitly- learnt these countries are russia's neighbors. Still, I would love to examine their geography scores to be sure about this method's efficiency.

Many UK children have become less confident about succeeding in life by the time they leave school, a report says. The study by think-tank Demos says some pupils feel school is just preparing them for exam success. It urges the government to help schools and colleges explore how self-belief, perseverance and resilience can be instilled in pupils.

I think that not only UK chidren but also our children less confident and unhappy in real life. If same research is done in Turkey, I think that similar results can be obtained. Students spend 12 years in school (primary school, secondary and high school). And they learn socialising, success, failure in school. In traditional classrooms, success is gaining high score in exam, ranked in first three in competition and failure is gaining lower scores on exam. When students leave the school, they face with new environment that is not similar to school. I think, therefore, they can not adopt to this new environment they feel unhappy and less confident. For this reason, schools should bring the skills and qualities that are needed for out of the school. Community service course, role playing, field works should be done in the schools to introduce real life experinces to students. In addition, changing the laerning activites, assesment procedures in school also can be helpful for real life experinces.

In several videos it was said that we start to prepare our pupils for jobs that are not invented yet. It is because there are lots of information production and exchange throughout world now, which makes lots of jobs become obsolete in short period of times. Our students need to have skills to locate, synthesis, and evaluate information and adapt theirselves to new contexts instead of having static knowledge about specific jobs.

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.

By this classroom, students work and learn naturally by communicating with each other and with the teacher actively in real time. Interactive tablets, computers and the board provide students work with groups using technology, while natural learning happens.

summerize where the technology will be in 10 years in schools. But what can we say about our schools? Even people are paying big amount of money for private schools, they still not have such a technology in their class. Technology getting cheaper and cheaper everyday but still I wonder how many years we need to wait to see these kind of technlogies in our school?

This is great example to CSCL but when I thought about Kutay's question according to our country; my answer get upset me :/ Because while we cannot use the smartboards at our clasroom, that kind of usage is just a dream :/

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:)

the page briefly and clearly defines what situated learning is, and shows how to create authentic learning contexts by using digital media. There are very short videos showing situated learning genres and some handouts which can be helpful in the class.

While I was reading about interactive case scenarios, I remembered some of my friends playing a game on the Internet called "fantasy role play". I am sure most of us have already heard about it because it is very popular among METU students. Actually the major aim of the game is to have some fun, but it can also be organized as a learning tool.

Thanks for sharing the examples. I already started thinking about how to integrate these into teacher training programs.

When situated learning theory (SLT) is investigated, it can be seen that most of the articles or documents mention learning by doing within an actual context. The first thing that comes to mind is the real world environment while someone mentions the SLT. What if we want to form a "legitimate peripheral participation" environment to learn a concept by the boundaries of online platforms? How can we design online platforms by using situated learning theory?

"Participation Learning becomes a social process dependent upon transactions with others. Learning is not separated from the world of action but exists in robust, complex, social environments made up of actors, actions, and situations. How to incorporate participation in online learning? *Create discussion boards to enable students to reflect socially *Encourage engagement in discussions and issues presented *Require students to present/defend their arguments in forums, discussion groups, bulletin boards *Encourage students to engage in critical reflection with other *Instructors should continually assess the growth of the student, and let the student know " These are the principles applied in our 542 course. We are experiencing situated cognition in progress.

As the issues and problems that define contemporary education become increasingly complex, our collective need for new knowledge and innovative solutions for practice in diverse educational contexts increases. Yet classroom teachers and school leaders often struggle to see any meaningful connection between educational research conducted in universities and their real-world, complex and contextually rich experiences of teaching, learning and leading in schools.

As the issues and problems that define contemporary education become increasingly complex, our collective need for new knowledge and innovative solutions for practice in diverse educational contexts increases. Yet classroom teachers and school leaders often struggle to see any meaningful connection between educational research conducted in universities and their real-world, complex and contextually rich experiences of teaching, learning and leading in schools.

They say "No one else does what we do" while mentioning their interdisciplinary approach. They say that "The learning sciences field emerged more than two decades ago after researchers found that what worked in a laboratory simply did not hold up with real children, teachers, classrooms and workplaces. They saw that learning technologies, which held great promise for solving education's problems, were not being transferred to classrooms and schools. Cognitive scientists, educational and instructional psychologists, and computer scientists worked together to put their ideas and knowledge to use to improve the learning outcomes for a diverse group." The institute basically do two things: 1 - They identify the critical challenges in education, literacy, mathematics, science and the social sciences. 2- They work to find solutions. Their main aim is to create learning systems for 21st century classrooms thanks to interdisciplinary research in teaching and learning. They believe that learning is a complex process and so they get benefit from different disciplines (e.g. anthropology, computer science, education, linguistics, psychology and sociology) to share knowledge and best practices on education. At their another webpage, they define learning science as a science which "focuses on how to create new, improved and equitable learning environments for 21st century learners.". In order accomplish this, they focus on four questions: 1- How do people learn? 2- What do we want them to know and be able to do? 3- How can we design learning environments that help them learn? 4- How can we monitor what they are learning? They offer a Ph.D. program to raise future learning scientists.

College professors and instructors can learn a lot from the chapters of a digital textbook that they assign students to read. Reynol Junco, an associate professor in Iowa State University's School of Education, says digital books provide real-time analytics to help faculty assess how students are doing in the class.

In this research, digital textbook is used for predicting students outcomes. With help of digital text book, instructors can track the time students spend reading. On the other hand, with regular textbooks, instructor do not know how students are doing or whether they read the assigned material or not until they give a graded assignment. Digital text book gives opportunity to teacher to monitor their students' actions and can take precation to make students read the material.With help of digital text book, instructors can track the time students spend on reading. By this way, instructor can gain some information like the material complexity for students reading level and s/he can adapt course material or take other precautions to help students succeed.

The talk is about a research conducted by Indian Pawan Shinha. The research has been conducted on a group of 200 children. They were blind as a result of cataract. He pioneered the project which consists of treatment and post observation. He defined learning seeing step by step. He uttered that after treatment, the patient cannot differentiate the shapes; even the shadow is an object for them. The video has real data which is very interesting in my opinion.

It gives you a big opportunity to be in the game when you do sport. You can challenge with yourself by seeing yourself in the real sport field. Also you can improve your performance and learn with enjoyable games.

I agree with you Busra, it is very lightly augmented:) We may say that in time you may learn how to run in which distance and which tempo but that is all for now.

I agree with büşra, it a kind of visual version of runtastic with that form but it can be developed. For example, think about you run at treadmill (maybe upgraded version for VR) and with the VR glasses you can go to the any environment from the list you can choose. I think, it would be fantastic.

A short trailer for the future of sport with augmented reality. We can imagine how it will change the performance and also popularity of sports. Furthermore, it seems that augmented reality will change the way of playing, more challenged games in every sport field.

I watched it before and when I watched Nintendo Wii come to my mind. That changes to habit of game console and I think it is revolutionary. With those applications, maybe our sports habits can change in time.

Actually when i watched it I thought Xbox which recognise you and put you in diffirent games. But Wii also not a bad example. I had a Wii platform but the limitation on that is the equipments which gives you a chance to move without doing the real move because of their calibration, i guess.

This could be addition to Elanur's "All in the mind?" post. There is often a big divide between what happens in the laboratory and the way laboratory findings are practically applied. The relationship between neuroscience research and education is no exception. While there are numerous educational products that claim to be based on neuroscience research (often quite dubiously so), the real impact of brain-based research on education has been much more subtle.

This box can be informative and fun AR environment for primary or elementary school students to form topographies and simulate real time water flow in geology and science lessons.

I hated geography lesson when I was in high school and while I see those kinds of application, I wish studying at high school now with those technological tools :) I think it can be really beneficial and also gain creativity of students.

I thought besides making sand castles on the beach, primary or elementary students can play sand to learn topographies and water flow at the same time. And yeah why not, for high school students it can also be fun and beneficial for improving their creativity :)

When I was 1 st year undergraduate student in METU, We were using this online platform at my physic's course. Generally there were 10 problems assigned with sub-layers. It was offering rapid feedback, simulations and we were also graded.

Mustafa, It was really helpful from some aspects but I remember that I was frequently complaining about the software. It gave a chance to practice a lot what I had learnt previous class. It was good to have problems in a large scale of complexity ( from easiest to hardest). And sometimes questions were picturized and there were graphs etc. Mostly, they were for real life situations. We were trying to solve problems which we come face to face everyday.However, there were also drawbacks, for example the answers arranged in a way that they do not accept any other solution computer offers.Our answers had to be exactly same from decimals to points. This could sometimes let a disoppointment and robbed my motivation down.And there were fear of getting bad marks because in the and of the homework we were graded by our performance. All in all, despite its drawbacks, 7 years ago it was nice to have this different kind of method in our classess.

Thank you Ceren for sharing your experiences, you underlined very important points especially the one about answers.

I've watched the video twice and in the end I've felt some concerns about the results of the studies. In the "how people learn" part, researchers were testing the storage and connection system of the brain through some high-tech tools. However, does neuropsychology provide enough evidence on the functioning of the brains? Can we generalize the results to all people from all cultures? I am not the one who is against neuropsychology, but for me one discipline may not give an appropriate answer to such a deep question. My second concern is about the integration of computer programs into the curriculum as a major learning tool. We see a program where "Betty" is speaking and giving feedback on the video. The program seems user friendly, but what about the negative aspects and limitations of the integration of technology into learning? Ok, I agree that we have to adapt to the rapid technological changes in the society. However, is technology the key to all learning processes? Plus, the program is designed on the mapping of the concepts. Does concept mapping make a curriculum compelling all the time? I am not sure about all characteristics of the program, but if it hasn't been designed in a challenging style and if all students come up with the same products, then how will they develop their knowledge and reasoning abilities? I couldn't find an answer to that. As for the part "effective teaching", I am in the same opinion with the researchers that there should be a connection between the real world and the subject taught. Moreover, I think the integration of the disciplines is difficult but a very good way of giving meaning to life. Besides, in the video we see teachers as a guide, as a facilitator and there is no doubt that providing individual support to the students helps students feel more involved.

Firstly, even if it is designed by utilizing modern technology and different understanding, which makes it a more developed and complicated one, the program used in the video reminded me the teaching machines of old times. It gives the priority to the cognitive aspect of learning. This seems to be a one-dimensional approach which underestimates the social aspect of learning. I think the value of classroom interaction for effective learning cannot be replaced by any kind of computer programs. Research on brain is really important and it provides very useful insights for learning and instructional activities. However, it should be supported by the findings of research by social psychologists as well. The very same individual may perform at varying levels when he is taught with the same methods in different environments. I personally experienced many times that even the absence of one individual in my classes affected the teaching an learning processes in a negative or positive way depending upon the classroom dinamics.

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.