design portfolio
2023 - 2024
Learning Design and Technology
Danielle
Stanford’24
Graduate School of Education
ABOUT ME
I am an educator from Singapore and in my portfolio,
I’ll share the story of the 3Ps - Practice, Policy and Pedagogy, that have brought me to Stanford.
ABOUT ME
Practice: After spending 5 years learning and growing as a beginning teacher in a middle school in Singapore, I was intrigued by the tensions that teachers as practitioners encounter on a daily basis, particularly in personalizing learning experiences to 40 students in the classroom at one go, and simultaneously giving ample thought on how to foster an inclusive environment which develops them as unique individuals.
ABOUT ME
Policy: The most recent 3.5 years spent in the Educational Technology Division in Singapore exposed me to new paradigms of thinking about the challenges faced particularly through the design of learning experiences and its learning spaces.
It also honed my experience in implementing EdTech initiatives at scale. Utilizing the approaches of Design Thinking and Futures Thinking in my work on a day-to-day basis was an exciting time generating new and practical possibilities for the future.
That’s me!
Pedagogy: In Learning Design and Technology, I am interested to explore how Educational Technology can be leveraged within Pedagogy to design teaching and learning in powerful and creative ways.
I believe that if used with good awareness within societal and cultural contexts, educational technology is a powerful enabler to increase equity and access in education. This also means it is necessary to harness the capacity of teachers, who are power agents and facilitators in the process of empowering our youth.
My Learning Journey
Click on each quarter to see my learnings!
Summer
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Summer
During my internship with the VFT Team at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, I had the privilege to develop invaluable knowledge and skills on engaging students and teachers in immersive technology such as virtual learning.
The work done in the VFT landscape supports teachers most directly in being engaging facilitators, innovative learning designers and adaptive instructors, as virtual learning has so much potential to create personalized learning for students. In terms of thinking about teacher training and professional development, the medium of designing VFTs could also be a central feature in professional development circles, and thus an opportunity for teachers to upskill with new and immersive technology.
EDUC 229D LDT Capstone Project
‘Chalk Up: A self-learning tool for teachers’
This quarter, our team focused on building out our prototype on an actual website, and doing our final rounds of user interviews to validate our theory of change. We learnt how to create effective logos, blurbs and promo videos to get the users we need plugged in!
Click on the link on the left to visit our tool and see our promo video under ‘About Chalk Up!’
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Spring
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Spring
In-person & virtual sessions to experiment with VR headsets & data visualization
During my internship at Flow Immersive, I explored immersive technology (AR, VR) for educational purposes. This experience showed me how early-stage companies develop use cases for immersive data visualization in education and adopt new technologies to build traction.
The internship was highly relevant to my studies in learning sciences, providing frameworks on how learners build mental models, which I applied to data visualization. Key principles included being question-driven, using visualization to structure information, and promoting self-directed learning. I also learned about value proposition and user flow development in startups. Observing Flow's CEO highlighted the importance of commitment, ethics, and purpose in new ventures, deepening my understanding of the dedication required to establish a successful company.
Here’s me and my co-intern Brent, who were helping to set up a VR simulation for filming!
EDUC 295
Entrepreneurship & Innovation in Education Technology Seminar
SgScalEd -
Scaling high-quality Edtech products in Singapore
In this class, I was able to learn from a stellar line-up of EdTech founders, VCs and team-builders who shed great insight on their experiences. Through setting up a strong vision & mission, using key principles to understand customers to establish product-market fit, pretotyping and prototyping - these concepts helped me apply what I had previously learnt in theory to real-world scenarios. As our final deliverable, I was able to propose an envisioned non-profit company called ‘SgScalEd’ which aims to scale high-quality Edtech products nation-wide for K-12 applying these lines of analyses, which was exciting and motivating!
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work done in Spring
EDUC 229C LDT Capstone Project
‘Chalk Up: A self-learning tool for teachers’
Based on deeper findings from our users, we pivoted from ‘History Hacks’ to a broader implementation of a tool called ‘Chalk Up’ that encourages self-learning in teachers. It is aimed as a professional learning tool that supports the middle school teachers to take charge of their learning trajectory through the self-identification of one’s teaching strengths and needs, the access to targeted resources and the setting of a SMART action plan.
Focusing on how the theory of change works, and collecting evidence of learning from our users was a fulfilling process this quarter, as I got to work on one of the wicked problems surrounding teacher dissatisfaction and attrition in school systems.
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Winter
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Winter
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Learning, Making, Crafting & Creating
Proficiency Project 1: PillowTalk™
How might we help parents build close emotional bonds with their toddlers amidst their busy and tiring lives?
This educational pillow was made from scratch. The planets serve as interactive buttons the child can press to hear an introduction to the planet and hear a prompt, which guides both parent and child to share about some of the most important moments and experiences each of them had during the day.
Proficiency Project 2: Pangaea to the Present
Designed for children ages 7 and up, to learn about the continental shifts which gave rise to the different continents over the period of 250 million years through a mini-puzzle activity.
Proficiency Project 3: Stanford Standard Time Sundial feat. Hoover Tower
This is also made from scratch. with a self-designed 3D printed Hoover tower and a laser-cut Sundial.
The Hoover tower is lit by a LED lamp connected by a battery and simple circuit. Once the sun sets, the user can shift the knob which connects the circuit and lights the LED lamp affixed at the base of Hoover Tower.
Final Group Project:
Ada’s Imaginarium
Team Members: Ana, Khongi, Pearlyn and myself
Our team was intrigued with the possibility to engage kids to enjoy a portable set up which can be their source of fun anywhere!
Ada’s Imaginarium was designed to spark children’s imagination and stimulate their creativity.
Product: A joint experiment involving laser-cutting, bits and circuits, finger puppetry and the use of Octostudio in creating an interactive experience for children.
Reflection: Make, to Learn
What I enjoyed the most from this course was the process of trying, failing, iterating, and self-appraising. Defining one's own success in a formal educational setting is a novel way of approaching assessment to me. Experiencing it highlighted how powerful this is to encourage intrinsic motivation in learners as it allows the removal of fear of failure, which is empowering.
Educational scholars like Dewey, Whitehead, Holt and Silberman have raised that a “central problem with the educational system is its inability to preserve the intrinsic interest in learning and exploration that the child seems to possess when he first enters school” and that the schooling process seems almost to undermine children's spontaneous interest in the process of learning itself.” My experience in the Making class this quarter has helped me have a taste of what it’s like when standards and assessments do not get in the way of learning, and is an interesting design challenge to put forth in other contexts out of Maker Education for myself and my own students in the future.
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work done in Winter
Core Mechanics & Deliberate Practice in Teaching
Just like designing for good conversations to take place, other outcomes of having good pedagogy is impactful. Classrooms like that require teachers to undergo transformative and cognitive experiences. Hence, the idea of deliberate practice - an act that contributes to the amount of teaching expertise a teacher has, and in fact makes distinct the ‘expert’ teacher from an ‘experienced’ teacher is what has motivated me to design a solution which is but just one example of how this can concretely take place in Professional Learning.
This is not new. Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule shares how the rule to become world class at anything is to spent 10,000 hours honing it.
How might we design for deliberate practice to be a constant feature that continues even after pre-service education?
Core Mechanics & Deliberate Practice in Teaching
The amount of quality hours spent refining one’s craft, and not the quantity of hours spent teaching, that improves a teacher’s craft - means that a viable way of this deliberate practice has to be made. It could be done through autonomous approaches or it could be supported via the school system but either way, this is an important area of need.
This is what has shaped most of my research this quarter thinking about Professional Learning and designing for it, through an self-paced modular learning app that helps teachers with worked examples on specific teaching materials using key strategies.
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work done in Winter
Final Product from Curriculum Construction:
Fostering Authentic Engagement through Virtual Field Trips
Team Members: Ana Marinii, Emily O Liu, Jerry Shan, Myself
We worked with our Site Partner - the Virtual Field Trips Team at Stanford Accelerator for Learning, to create an asynchronous guide for educators to design their own Virtual Field Trips in classrooms.
Final Product from Curriculum Construction:
Fostering Authentic Engagement through Virtual Field Trips
To adapt to teachers’ needs for flexible professional development learning modules, this guide was designed to be asynchronously executed, yet still with the powerful connections made with other teachers in a learning community to share and learn from each others’ works.
Other Inspiring ideas from Curriculum Construction:
Jazz, and School
Some questions that sparked thinking behind my LDT Capstone project were inspired by Elliot Eisner’s work on
“The Kind of Schools We Need” -
“How do we enable students to become more like students in a jazz quartet, whose interplay good conversation sometimes seem to emulate?
How do we create in our classrooms, a practice that, when done well, can be a model of intellectual activity?“
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work done in Winter
LDT Capstone Project & Learning Design Challenge
Applying research-backed learning sciences
History Hacks, is aimed as a professional learning tool that supports the teaching of middle school history, through the effective use of learning sciences in their pedagogy and evaluation.
Early ideas and concepts
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Fall
Fall
A Career Bot
to help students chart their career path and learning trajectory
EDUC 391 Career Bot
The goal of this project was to practise user research and quick and dirty prototyping to test and improve concepts and ideas in its infancy.
To “Get out of the Building” is an important concept that will stick with me - maintain a bias to action and act quickly to receive feedback from users and experts to ensure its viability and user -centricity.
This experience helped me connect the dots between how learners learn , how we can design intentionally for interactions to occur, and how technology can support this endeavor.
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Contact Me
to exchange / share more ideas!