Genuine instances of communication are multimodal in nature. Thus, important aspects of effective communication such as gestures, facial expression, visual context, or interpersonal distance, are usually present in listening events and participate in the communicative act, creating a given multimodal message. The Common European Framework of…

Approximately 65% of young children with visual impairments have another disability such as developmental delay, cerebral palsy, or hearing loss. Furthermore, cerebral/cortical visual impairment is the most prevalent visual condition among young children with severe visual impairment in the United States (Hatton et al., 2013). This article…

In an ideal world, classrooms are not designed for and educators are not trained to teach the average student because the average student does not exist. Each student has unique measures, unique strengths, and weaknesses. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) allows teachers to easily accommodate every student; it blurs the lines of special…

During the 2013-2014 school year, a charter school in Central Florida (which will be given the pseudonym "The Unity School") known for its practice of full inclusion launched an unconventional project. The Unity School, which serves children from preschool through grade five, began offering foreign language to all pre-kindergarten…

Accessibility is a hot topic in online education these days. Despite the increased focus on accessibility, most discussions of creating "accessible" online courses and elearning simply focus on adding alternative text to images and captions to video. In this article, we argue that online educators and workplace learning professionals…

Inclusion and differentiation--hallmarks of the current educational system--require a paradigm shift in the way that educators run their classrooms. This article enumerates the need for techno-kinesthetic, visually based activities and offers an example of a calculator-based programming activity that addresses that need. After discussing the use…

The latest developments of information and communication technologies (ICT) and its large penetration in different sectors of our society pose new challenges and demands in the field of education. This special issue entitled "Designing Nordic technology-enhanced learning (TEL)", presents and discusses how researchers in the Nordic…

Gifted students have unique educational needs. Although gifted students are as varied as other students in terms of their learning styles and preferences, all gifted learners have exhibited unusual performance or potential and they have distinctive characteristics, shared by most of these students, which require effective responses from educators.…

This paper identifies the need for developing new ways to study curiosity in the context of today's pervasive technologies and unprecedented information access. Curiosity is defined in this paper in a way which incorporates the concomitant constructs of interest and engagement. A theoretical model for curiosity, interest and engagement in new…

Educational Technology;Technology Integration;The field of education now faces an increasingly diverse student body that includes English as second language speakers, those with physical as well as psychiatric disabilities, and multiple representations of races, ethnicities, and religions. Traditionally, postsecondary faculty have thought of…

The precise nature of learning styles has not yet been articulated by research; there are, however, several models and techniques to identify learning styles that appear to be especially suited for use by the bilingual classroom teacher. Three such models are presented: the Field-Dependence/Independence Model, the Educational Cognitive Style…

Charlotte, the author's 11-year-old daughter, was born with Down syndrome, and is currently attending the local middle school. In terms of her disability Charlotte is developing very well and has a reading age of 9+, however her maths skills age is approximately 4 years. It is not necessarily the case that if a child has good language and literacy…

Discusses concepts of semiotics relevant to visual literacy and stresses two important points of intersection: active perception and diversity of sign systems. Argues that an educational program with a semiotic framework would change its focus from content to process, and that a visual literacy component would enhance learning across modalities,…

After discovering at least 64 percent of their students were either tactile or kinesthetic learners, educators at North Carolina elementary school began grouping kids according to their tactile/kinesthetic or auditory/visual strengths and altered reading instruction schedules every three weeks so that each group had opportunities to learn at best…

This article discusses the evolution of teaching approaches in concert with the findings of over three decades of researches on student perceptual strengths. Confusing reports of successes and only limited successes for students with varied perceptual strengths suggest that combined auditory, visual, tactual, and/or kinesthetic instructional…