To stay fit, one needs to exercise. It might be a 30-minute cardio workout one day, some weight training the next, or just forgetting about the car and walking. In a similar way, one needs to invest in professional health. What exercise regime do teacher-librarians need to grow their skills and be able to lead? Just like at any upscale health…

Emerging digital technologies enable teachers and students to access and manipulate sights and sounds in their school environments. The challenge is to systematically include these new media in academic environments, and to include adults who are ill prepared in technical issues as primary guides in this effort. This article suggests that child's…

Colleges and universities have become increasingly dependent on technology to accomplish nearly every aspect of their work. The range of systems and services supported by IT staff enrich teaching, learning, research, and administration. As the systems and applications campuses rely upon grow in number and complexity, IT leaders increasingly face…

Use of the internet in today's culture, by young and old alike, is prevalent and continues to increase. Tasks commonly performed via the internet include sharing information, purchasing goods and services, delivering educational courses, and conducting survey research. The purpose of this article is to illustrate how the use of an online survey…

A Web mashup is an application that combines data and functionality from more than one source. By bringing disparate data together in ways that enable users to do new things or accomplish common tasks with newfound efficiency, mashups are rapidly increasing in number and may offer exciting new possibilities for classroom instruction. However, in…

This article presents a social studies unit plan taught to fifth graders in a gifted resource class that infuses technology into student-centered activities. The unit demonstrates how the teacher and students were able to use the technology to learn about life during the Klondike Gold Rush. The goal of the unit was to show how the Klondike Gold…

Smart classrooms are just as popular on other community college campuses. Through a combination of PowerPoint presentations, videos, Web pages, and other technologies, faculty can engage students using multimedia to create a richer, more compelling learning experience. This article talks about the use of smart classrooms and the educational…

When it comes to inspiring, motivating and engaging the most challenging students, online video has been the "X" factor that has made it all possible for the author. It has bought her those precious moments when the whole class are utterly absorbed and she can line up the next activity. Most schools now have reliable broadband and projectors in…

A librarian may be comfortable with the idea of using a blog, wiki, or other social application with students, but other stakeholders in his or her community may not be so sure. Any technology maverick looking to sell the use of Web-based applications will, at some point, have to make the case. This article presents some of the most common…

In this article, the author shares a lesson that uses the Message in a Bottle concept. This lesson combines social studies, language arts, technology, and art, particularly studying and drawing portraits and utilizing values within a drawing. As part of their grade-four art curriculum, students are required to correctly proportion the face and the…

The nonprofit organization One Laptop per Child (OLPC) has a mission that is easy to articulate but very challenging to achieve: Provide laptop computers to the almost 2 billion children who live in parts of the world where poverty and the lack of a structured educational system deprive them of an adequate education. To further complicate the…

Since the earliest days of the profession, school libraries have been establishing standards and guidelines to guide and shape school library programs. For the most part, the standards have shaped what programs are and what they do. Rarely has a set of standards focused on the content and process of what school libraries teach students. The…

Learning scientists have discovered that deep learning is more likely to occur in complex social and technological environments, one example of this is computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) situations. This was the main guideline when partners of Socrates Comenius 2.1-project FISTE (A Future Way for In-Service Teacher Training Across…

This list of best practice strategies is based on "Institutional Policies/Practices and Course Design Strategies to Promote Academic Integrity in Online Education," produced by WCET (WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies) in February 2009 and updated in April 2009. In May 2009, the Instructional Technology Council (ITC) surveyed…

The majority of school districts in the U.S. are providing some form of online learning for their students. In the past, virtual schools primarily targeted advanced students who didn't have access to certain courses in their regular schools. Recently, however, many virtual schools have shifted their focus to credit recovery as a way to provide…