Elena is a teacher educator and Full Professor in Applied Linguistics at Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, North Macedonia. Her research interest include mentoring, group dynamics, motivation, learner/teacher autonomy and wellbeing. Elena is particularly interested in facilitating reflective practice in its many forms, including through using the arts.
Elena provided the theoretical underpinning for Noticing and actively participated in both prompt engineering and the implementation of the scaffolding of the mentoring discussions. In fact, Noticing emerged from a real need: on her low-resource university-based teacher education module, her English language pre-service teachers needed mentors to discuss, one-to-one, their practical teaching experiences.
Elena collects and analyses usage feedback, while also using the app herself, as a teacher educator to ensure that the development of Noticing follows an Agile process. She has also established a Macedonian nation-wide network of English language teachers, who use Noticing as a key part of their mentor training programme, to learn how to scaffold teacher learning in non-judgemental ways.
Matthew is a full-stack software architect and engineer specialising in web applications and database systems. He has a background in mathematics, and 15 years of experience in software development. His main interests are in data modelling, AI, and the development of user-friendly interfaces.
Matthew is the sole developer of the Noticing web application, integral in its design, AI integration, and event-driven chat interfaces. He is focussed on accessibility, via the development of text, image and voice inputs and outputs, as well as progressively enhancing the web app to allow for low-/no-internet contexts, and optimised usage in both mobile and desktop.
His recent research into LLMs informed the app's AI capabilities, limitations and utilisation; and a deep dive into prompt engineering, prompt chaining, chain-of-thought and multi-AI collaboration were needed to rein in overly helpful GPTs and to moderate multi-step scaffolded sessions.
We are always looking for new partners and collaborators. If you are interested in using Noticing in your educational context, or if you would like to contribute to our research, please get in touch.
