In order to help teachers envision digital products in action in classrooms, the authors look at three examples of how teachers they know enhance learning time by employing technology efficiently. The examples include: (1) a social studies teacher who begins each class period with a three-question formative assessment using the website…

Higher education, is entering a period in which it is the "connections" between everything and everyone that are of importance. This development is most conspicuous in teaching and learning and is enabled by information technology, social media, and mobile devices. This advent of "connected learning" is having an impact on all…

Creatures from science fiction and fantasy can be used to illustrate key concepts and principles in biology. This article describes a project for a university-level general zoology course wherein the students classify, down to at least the phylum level, "animals" from the Alien Species Wiki (2013). This is an online database of creatures from…

The web has created new possibilities for collaboration that fit under the terms crowdsourcing and human-based computation. Crowdsourcing applies when a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body. Human-based computation refers to ways that humans and computers can work together to solve problems. These two…

It wasn't long ago that an institution's primary social media options were Facebook and Twitter. Then, colleges and universities began diving into social media even if they didn't quite yet know what they should be trying to accomplish with these new channels. Now, as new platforms continually emerge, knowing when it's time to invest institutional…

The unexpectedness of the birthday problem has long been used by teachers of statistics in discussing basic probability calculation. An activity is described that engages students in understanding probability and sampling using the popular Facebook social networking site. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

Inside campus libraries and dormitory rooms, thousands of students connect to the Internet not only to study with online systems like Blackboard but also to watch movies and TV shows on Netflix. Computers, smartphones, wireless printers, tablets, iPods, Xboxes, handheld gaming systems, e-readers, smart TVs, Blu-ray players--students now bring an…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in various subjects such as mathematics, reading, science, and writing, as well as civics, geography, U.S. history, and technology and engineering literacy. The results of NAEP are…

Data visualization is the term used to describe the methods and technologies used to allow the exploration and communication of quantitative information graphically. Data visualization is a rapidly growing and evolving discipline, and visualizations are widely used to cover politics. Yet, while popular and scholarly publications widely use…

This article describes an arts- and spatial thinking skill--integrated inquiry project applied to life science concepts from the Next Generation Science Standards for fourth grade students that focuses on two unifying or crosscutting themes: (1) structure (or "form") and function and (2) use of models. Students made observations and…

Mathematics teachers continually look for ways to make the learning of mathematics more active and engaging. Hands-on activities, in particular, have been demonstrated to improve student engagement and understanding in mathematics classes. Likewise, many scholars have emphasized the growing importance of giving students experience with the…

Because Laura Lukes used to be a geologist, when she started teaching science, she wanted to incorporate field experiences in her classroom. But, like many teachers, she faced obstacles: insufficient budgets, testing requirements, a lack of chaperones and transportation, and the safety concerns that come with fieldwork. As a result, a real field…

Although the concept of the sampling distribution is at the core of much of what we do in econometrics, it is a concept that is often difficult for students to grasp. The thought process behind bootstrapping provides a way for students to conceptualize the sampling distribution in a way that is intuitive and visual. However, teaching students to…

Bioinformatics, biological databases, and the worldwide use of computers have accelerated biological research in many fields, such as evolutionary biology. Here, we describe a primer of nucleotide sequence management and the construction of a phylogenetic tree with two examples; the two selected are from completely different groups of organisms:…

Here's the tricky part: If we teach ourselves and our students that texts are made to be broken apart, remixed, remade, do we lose the polymorphous perversity that brought us pleasure in the first place? Does the pleasure of transgression evaporate when the borders are opened?