This article describes how researchers work with military to create the next generation of training technology. This article also describes the features of Flatworld, a virtual military training technology. Flatworld is one of many projects under development at the Institute for Creative Technologies, a research group that is supported primarily…

Teaching first-year engineering students in a laptop environment requires carefully choosing and then adapting teaching methods. This chapter describes how laptops were used, how the students responded, and what the group of participating faculty learned in the process. (Contains 6 figures.)

Navigating through hypermedia the user faces problems of locating oneself with respect to space and time. That is why there is a need to develop tools that can help the user locate himself to see where he has been browsing through the net during a particular navigation session through hypermedia. It is needed to offer the user a map of the visited…

This article argues that computers, at least in their common or prevalent uses, constitute an important undermining influence on people's ability to tell, enjoy listening to, view, and read good stories. We discuss the centrality of narrative in defining our humanity and in educating our children, and justify the emphasis on "good" stories,…

In this paper, we give a detailed account of the design principles and construction of activities designed for learning about the relationships between position, velocity and acceleration, and corresponding kinematics graphs. Our approach is model-based, that is, it focuses attention on the idea that students constructed their own models--in the…

Although the content and nature of teachers' practical and theoretical knowledge has continued to evolve since the mid to late 1970s, current conceptualizations of teacher knowledge do not adequately reflect the knowledge and skills teachers need to successfully navigate a technologically rich educational environment. This article summarizes…

The presence of computers in early childhood classrooms is growing, despite serious doubts about whether young children really need them or benefit from using them. A recent study of child care centers in Texas found that preschool children were using computers in more than 75% of these institutions. According to most child development experts,…

The procedure to produce standard curve for starch concentration measurement by image analysis using a color scanner and computer for data acquisition and color analysis is described. Color analysis is performed by a Visual Basic program that measures red, green, and blue (RGB) color intensities for pixels within the scanner image.

Accountability mandates such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have drawn attention to the practical use of student data for school improvement. Nevertheless, schools may struggle with these mandates because student data are often stored in forms that are difficult to access, manipulate, and interpret. Such access barriers additionally preclude the…

As new information and communication technologies permeate classrooms and libraries, educators have the responsibility to assist students in comprehending and understanding the information that is now available online. How can we instruct students to become skilled, strategic readers when they encounter online texts and hypertextual formats? By…

The author acknowledges that there is often a gap in how and for what ends technology is used--a gap between some students and their teachers and a gap among different groups of students. What is less obvious is the nature of these gaps in terms of literacy practices. He then asks, "Could we be missing ways to connect with our students and help…

In this article, I examine distributed scaffolding, an emerging approach in the design of supports for rich learning environments intended to help students develop disciplinary ways of knowing, doing, and communicating. Distributed scaffolding incorporates multiple forms of support that are provided through different means to address the complex…

In this article, the author touches on the ways that technology can come to the aid of teachers with students who don't speak English. He discusses different word processors that successfully translate foreign text.

Educators have been wrestling with copyright issues for some time. In fact, in developing the S.O.S. for Information Literacy site, the project team had to face the issue with respect to how to handle all those lesson plans in the database and all the images, clipart, and materials that educators upload to the database as support materials for…

The need for designing the next generation of web service-based educational systems with the ability of integrating components from different tools and platforms is now recognised as the major challenge in advanced learning technologies. In this paper, we discuss this issue and we present the conceptual design of such environment, referred to as…