It is critical that students learn how to retrieve useful information in hypermedia environments, a task that is often especially difficult when it comes to image retrieval, as little text feedback is given that allows them to reformulate keywords they need to use. This situation may make students feel disorientated while attempting image…

This study seeks to design and facilitate active reading among secondary school students with an online annotation tool--Diigo. Two classes of different academic performance levels were recruited to examine their annotation behavior and perceptions of Diigo. We wanted to determine whether the two classes differed in how they used Diigo; how they…

LS-Lab provides automatic support to comparison/evaluation of the Learning Object Sequences produced by different Curriculum Sequencing Algorithms. Through this framework a teacher can verify the correspondence between the behaviour of different sequencing algorithms and her pedagogical preferences. In fact the teacher can compare algorithms…

Competency in the new literacies of the Internet is essential for participating in contemporary society. Researchers studying these new literacies are recognizing the limitations of traditional methodological tools and adapting new technologies and new media for use in research. This paper reports our exploration of usability testing software to…

The purpose of this study is to address the pragmatics of integrating virtual worlds for teaching and learning for K-12 education. Specifically this qualitative investigation focuses on a reflective dialogue gathered from a group of K-12 (primary and secondary school) educators about their experiences using both "Active Worlds Educational…

This paper presents a comprehensive usability study conducted within the context of a Europe-wide project. The design of the evaluated e-learning platform is based on an innovative approach to the education of young Europeans by integrating into the curricula of a Europe-wide network of 14 schools different state-of-the-art technologies in…

Teachable agent is a type of pedagogical agent which instantiates Learning-by-Teaching theory through simulating a "naive" learner in order to motivate students to teach it. This paper discusses the limitation of existing teachable agents and incorporates intrinsic motivation to the agent model to enable teachable agents with initiative…

This paper presents both the design and the pilot formative evaluation study of a computer-based problem-solving environment (named LECGO: Learning Environment for programming using C using Geometrical Objects) for the learning of computer programming using C by beginners. In its design, constructivist and social learning theories were taken into…

ASSISTments is a web-based math tutor designed to address the need for timely student assessment while simultaneously providing instruction, thereby avoiding lost instruction time that typically occurs during assessment. This article presents a quasi-experiment that evaluates whether ASSISTments use has an effect on improving middle school…

In K-12 classrooms, as well as on the college and university level, the incorporation of digital games has played a vital role in the educational system. While introducing teachers to new fields, these digital games have been designed and implemented for the classroom and have shown positive results at a variety of educational levels. Cases on…

This paper describes a study aimed to identify most common impediments related to the introduction of an open-source mathematical software package GeoGebra. We report on the analysis of data collected during a three-week professional development programme organised for middle and high school teachers in Florida. The study identified challenges…

Learner centred design methods highlight the importance of involving the stakeholders of the learning process (learners, teachers, educational researchers) at all stages of the design of educational applications and of refining the design through an iterative prototyping process. These methods have been used successfully when designing systems…

Much recent research and funding have focused on building Internet-based repositories that contain collections of high-quality learning resources, often called "learning objects." Yet little is known about how non-specialist users, in particular teachers, find, access, and use digital learning resources. To address this gap, this article…

This article presents sets of observations and recommendations for Web-based distance learning, based on formative and summative performance and opinion data collected from participants involved in the design, development, and utilization of Wired Class, a Web-based learning environment that was developed to teach mathematics to Egyptian secondary…