The world outside schools is changing rapidly with the advances of technology and economic requirements for a 21st-century global citizenry. Today, technology has moved into one's everyday life and is becoming a pervasive part of how one works, learns, and plays. Similarly, networked communications and computer technology have transformed the…

In most teacher education courses, instructional strategies are merely listed and explained. Students rarely have the opportunity to see these strategies in use until they become student teachers. What better way to teach secondary instructional strategies to pre-service teachers than by modeling these strategies using teacher education content?…

This paper describes how digital talking books (DTBs) with embedded functionality for learners can be generated from content structured according to the OU OpenLearn schema. It includes examples showing how a software transformation developed from open source components can be used to remix OpenLearn content, and discusses issues concerning the…

"The Geography Teacher" provides hands-on reference and educative material for K-12 Geography teachers. The journal also pioneers innovative ideas for contemporary teaching methods, including lesson plans. This issue contains the following: (1) Census in Schools Program (census.gov); (2) Ask Dr. de Blij (Dr. Harm de Blij); (3) Eritrea:…

Colorado State University (CSU) is located in Fort Collins, which is a midsize city of 134,000 situated in Northern Colorado at the western edge of the Great Plains and at the base of the Rocky Mountains. CSU's total enrollment is approximately 25,000 students. The Division of Student Affairs comprises 30 departments organized into programmatic…

A youth community informatics (YCI) research project intersected an inquiry learning model with the making of audiovisual podcasts to foster personal growth and community engagement in a group of Mexican American youth enrolled in an afterschool program. Specifically, the article describes the cycle of inquiry together with the development of a…

This paper discusses a university-wide pilot designed to encourage academics to creatively explore learner-centred applications for digital audio. Participation in the pilot was diverse in terms of technical competence, confidence and contextual requirements and there was little prior experience of working with digital audio. Many innovative…

The Arkansas Department of Education Technology Plan provides policy makers, school districts, education service cooperatives and institutes of higher education with a blueprint that guides and facilitates future state and local technology planning, funding, implementation, and evaluation. The 2008 Plan builds on the progress of the last five-year…

The focus of this article is intervention for third-grade students with serious mathematics deficits at third grade. In third grade, such deficits are clearly established, and identification of mathematics disabilities typically begins. We provide background information on two aspects of mathematical cognition that present major challenges for…

Educators in K-12 and university settings have begun to embrace blogs for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. Blogging provides technical advantages that paper diaries do not, including the elimination of the notebooks themselves and the possibility of linking to relevant materials online rather than just citing them. In addition, the…

The dual purpose of this article is to provide a synthesis of the findings related to the use of computer simulations in physics education and to present implications for teachers and researchers in science education. We try to establish a conceptual framework for the utilization of computer simulations as a tool for learning and instruction in…

The lack of U.S. students entering the science, technology, engineering, and math fields is one of teachers' primary educational woes. Surveys show that the small percentage of U.S. college students who choose to major in a math or science field gets even smaller by the end of students' freshman year. While the responsibility of STEM (science,…

English language teaching (ELT) has played an important role in the Chinese Radio and Television Universities (RTVU) network since its establishment in the late 1970s. Based on a literature review and reflection from an insider's perspective, this paper gives a full account of the RTVU distance ELT model, examining how it supports autonomous…

This paper reports on a visit by two U.S. middle school teachers, one a special educator, to a conference on educational technology held in Japan. The trip also involved visits to elementary and secondary schools in Japan and a home stay with a Japanese family. The paper addresses misconceptions, differences, and similarities noted by the authors…

Although one role of computers in science education is to help students learn specific science concepts, computers are especially intriguing as a vehicle for fostering the development of epistemological knowledge about the nature of scientific knowledge--what it means to "know" in a scientific sense (diSessa, 1985). In this vein, the…