This article describes visual-based minimal-text food safety tools developed in Mandarin Chinese to educate Chinese-speaking food service workers about safe food handling practices. Ten posters and one PowerPoint presentation were developed, and their efficacy in conveying critical food safety messages was tested with Chinese-speaking food service…

Serious games have a great potential to help people developing new skills or improving previously existing ones. Deaf and blind community face considerable challenges and difficulties regarding to the acquisition of skills in literacy. The design of serious games to meet the needs of the target groups where the deaf and blind people are struggling…

School-based microenterprises and vocational training opportunities represent an effective approach to developing transferable vocational skills in students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The authors describe the implementation of an online, school-based microenterprise at a rural high school that emphasizes functional digital…

Icons are frequently used in the music classroom to depict concepts in a developmentally appropriate way for students. SmartBoards provide music educators yet another way to share these manipulatives with students. This article provides a step-by-step tutorial to create Smart Icon Cards using the folk song "Lucy Locket."

For learners who need sight-word practice, including young students and struggling readers, digital flash cards may promote automatic word recognition when used as a supplemental activity to regular reading instruction. A novel use of common presentation software efficiently supports this practice strategy.

Knowledge is power. Technological devices provide the new pathway to online learning and student retention. This is especially true for deaf learners, who have difficulty learning with the traditional pedagogies used in teaching. Results of studies have indicated that students using the suggested new technologies become more interested and…

With the rise of new technologies and media, the way we communicate is rapidly changing. "Literacies" provides a comprehensive introduction to literacy pedagogy within today's new media environment. It focuses not only on reading and writing, but also on other modes of communication, including oral, visual, audio, gestural and spatial.…

As Barry Brummett (1984) has argued, the purpose of rhetorical theory is pedagogical--providing students with resources for understanding the rhetorical transactions that they encounter every day. An understanding of the implications of ideology is necessary for advanced communication students. Kellner and Share (2005) contend that this is…

Student engagement is critical to academic success. High-Active Student Response (ASR) teaching techniques are an effective way to improve student engagement and are an important component of evidence-based practice. High-ASR teaching strategies accompany important assumptions: (1) ASR is an alterable variable; (2) teachers can increase ASR in…

The ability to verbalize--and therefore think and learn abstractly--has conditioned people to see the world in logical patterns. People are trained to do so by the wiring of the neurologically typical (neurotypical) brain and the increasing complexity of the environment that shapes it. Public schools are also designed for students with…

In this article we present an activity theory based framework that can capture the complex situations that arise when modern technology like multi-touch devices are introduced in classroom situations. As these devices are able to cover more activities than traditional technologies, even computerbased, media, we have to accept that they now take a…

Creating charts and graphs is all about visual abstraction: the process of representing aspects of data with imagery that can be interpreted by the reader. Children may need help making the link between the "real" and the image. This abstraction can be achieved using symbols, size, colour and position. Where the representation is close to what…

Composing with different modes--image, sound, video and the written word--to respond to and analyze literary and informational text helps students develop as readers and digital communicators. This article showcases five multimodal strategies for engaging children in rich literature-based learning using digital tools and Internet resources.

In this article, the author draws specifically on the work of Walter Benjamin and engages with the world of video games by focusing on the constitution of labor as it unfolds in modding practices, as well as approaching the very act of seeing labor in a highly visual culture where value is extracted not just through the labor process but also…

In school, students are expected to navigate different types of transitions every day, including those between instructors, subjects, and instructional formats, as well as classrooms. Despite the routines that many teachers develop to facilitate efficient transitions and maximize instructional time, many learners with ASD continue to struggle with…