My Vision and Journey:
When I was young, I was blessed to attend Sunset Park Elementary School in Miami, FL through 5th grade. Here, I was able to receive differentiated instruction to challenge me and reduce boredom. Once a week, I went to a center where gifted students from many schools spent the day exploring a wide range of activities such as string art, pottery, literature circles, women's history, and much more. Unfortunately, not all gifted students have these opportunities. Many view school as a waste of time. Even with my deep understanding of this frustration for my gifted students, as a regular classroom teacher I still found it difficult to give my gifted students the level of challenge they need. My dream is to create a website teachers can easily integrate into their language arts curriculum. Ideally, it will foster a love of language and reveal the treasure that can be found in reading, then apply that to their own writing as they "talk" about the deep topics they've uncovered from the reading.

In Fall 2009, I took a graduate course where we were required to create an instructional tool. Our team met to see if any of us had any ideas. After waiting a few excrutiating moments, I piped up and said, "I have an idea." Fortunately, this talented team loved it and were all ready to bring my dream to life. We used the rapid prototyping¹ process to create three games and a discussion board. After working out the glitches and conducting some talkalouds with a few gifted third graders, we tested it out with about 15 gifted third graders. There was no tracking of results and students were reluctant to say much in the discussions. Still, they were very enthusiastic. When asked in the focus group if they'd like more activities like this for other books, they all jumped up and down cheering, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" So, I knew I had to do more.

Our paths have diverged, but they were all pleased to hear I am continuing this work. Now I have two new amazing team members who have brought The Reader's Treasure to where it is today. (You can read about the original team and the current team below.) The purpose of the design experiment² I am currently conducting (Fall 2013-Spring 2014) is to ensure this website is aligned with current theory and practice in both literacy education and gifted education. I am also developing surveys and a literacy assessment that will provide useful data to inform modifications throughout my experiment and future improvements as well.

Thank you for taking the time to visit. If you are interested in reviewing the site or registering your students, go to the For Teachers page and click the request link. Your interest and feedback are valuable to me.

Join me in discovering The Reader's Treasure!

Beth Jordan
Founder and Lead Researcher

Original development team (Fall 2009):

• Beth Jordan, Founder, Instructional Designer
  After a decade of teaching elementary school, Beth decided to get her Ph.D. in Instructional Technology with a cognate in Reading. She is currently a doctoral candidate conducting her dissertation research developing this website as an online resource for regular classroom teachers to extend and enrich their literacy instruction for gifted elementary students, particularly third grade. Beth has a Bachelor's degree in Early Childhood Education from the University of South Florida (Tampa, FL) and an M.Ed. in Elementary Education from Columbus State University (Columbus, GA). Upon graduation, she hopes to become a professor where she can continue teaching pre-service teachers to effectively integrate technology to enhance student learning. View Curriculum Vitae (CV).
• Shelley Hayes, Instructional Designer, Programmer
  Shelley is working on her Ph.D. in Instructional Technology at the University of South Florida.
• Timber Faught, Graphic Artist, Instructional Designer
  Timber Holmes has twenty years of teaching experience including High School and College English, as well as, an adult learning. She has a BA in Writing from Eckerd College and a Masters in Literature from University of South Florida. Timber created the artwork for the site which Shelley then digitized. She was the main designer of the Art Appeal activities as well.
• Stephen Ringo, Technical Consultant
  Stephen Ringo was a technical consultant for this group, providing both programming and consultation on design. Stephen has a professional information technology background of over 14 years of experience, ranging from programming to data networking. He has also received a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Computer Science and Information Technology Management from Florida State University.

Meet the current team:

• Beth Jordan, Founder, Instructional Designer
  Beth continues to design and modify activities, write the material for the Lightning Learning Module, Internet Safety and Netiquette, is the voice of "Beth" in several of the videos, and does some basic HTML programming as well. She is currently conducting a design experiment using this website for her dissertation research.
• Bill Van Horne, Programmer and Instructional Designer
  Bill has a bachelor's degree in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has more than 30 years of experience in information technology, general business and consulting with clients. He spent 15 years as a contract web programmer before undertaking work on his M.Ed in Instructional Technology at the University of South Florida to further his adaptive learning system, Lightning Learner. He has implemented a subset of the functionality of this system in support of The Reader's Treasure via the Internet Safety and Netiquette module. Bill has also written javascript and Perl code to provide student login and data capture functionality to report the results from student activities to a MySQL database, allowing teachers to monitor the students. Bill is continually advancing his vision of an adaptive learning system that can accelerate acceptance of individualized learning, while still capitalizing on live human teachers.
• BJ Bryant, Multimedia Designer and Web Consultant
  BJ is a doctoral candidate in the Adult Education program at the University of South Florida. He is a highly skilled videograher and presents workshops on iMovie, Final Cut, and other video editing applications. BJ is an expert user of all versions of iLife and iWork, and is certified by Apple in iLife. He can also help you learn how to use interactive whiteboards in the classroom. BJ's research focuses on developing and teaching with accessible media with the use of ePub, ARIA, and HTML5 standards. BJ has earned a M. Ed. in Instructional Technology from USF and a B.A. in Electronic Media Art and Technology from the University of Tampa. BJ has created several of the instructional videos in the Internet Safety and Netiquette module and is the voice of "BJ" in those. He is responsible for the visual design and organization of the discussion board as well as a few other HTML updates. You can follow him on Twitter: @bjdsgn.

¹Allen, M.W. (2006). Creating successful e-learning: A rapid system for getting it right first tie, every time. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.
²Reinking, D., & Bradley, B.A. (2008). On Formative and Design Experiments: Approaches to Language and Literacy Research. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.