College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled "smart" classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. Jose A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to "teach naked"--by which he means, "sans" machines. More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants…

In 2007, Hamilton College, Colgate University, and St. Lawrence University received a grant from the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) Instructional Innovation Fund to take stock of the ways in which multimodal assignments were being used on campuses and to look in particular at the ways in which such assignments…

The wiki is an excellent tool for student collaboration and teacher assessment. Students' comfort with online social networking makes the wiki a perfect forum for students to coauthor works and to respond to each other's writing. In this article, the author discusses how to use a wiki to promote discussion and aid students with writing. He tested…

This section will reflect on two different classroom designs from my own teaching experience: one that required students to bring laptops and one that required only paper and pen. Because traditional classrooms were likely designed without taking technology into consideration, teachers should be aware of what the design of the classroom says about…

The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), located in Aurora Illinois, is a public, three-year residential high school for students who are academically talented in mathematics and/or science. The mission statement of IMSA is to "ignite and nurture creative, ethical, scientific minds that advance the human condition." This…

This manuscript is an edited transcript of a panel discussion held at a Society of Biblical Literature conference (Boston, Massachusetts, November 22 to 24, 2008). Alice Hunt begins the discussion by summarizing the content and significance of a new book by Dale Martin, "The Pedagogy of The Bible" (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008) in which he…

Mr. Smith and Ms. D'Amico are two veteran science teachers in a well-performing school district. Both teachers use weekly lab exercises and experiments as formative assessments. In their middle school classrooms, children are engaged and eager to learn. As students walk into Mr. Smith's classroom, a prescribed, step-by-step procedure of the day's…

This paper reports an application of multimedia in a blended learning environment in which students engaged in multimodal presentations and peer group discussion. Students' presentation files were commented upon by their peers on the discussion board and scored by the researcher, based on questions developed by Levy and Kimber (2009) to apply…

One privilege enjoyed by new-media authors is the opportunity to realize representations of Self that are rich textual worlds in themselves and also to engage the wider world, with a voice, a smile, imagery, and sound. Still, closer investigation of multimedia composition practices reveals levels of complexity with which the verbal virtuoso is…

This article discusses activities carried out in the virtual world of Second Life (SL) as part of a compulsory class in the first year of an undergraduate programme. The paper identifies the contribution of SL to the students' learning environment and an Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) approach to programme design. The reasons for taking an IBL…

This article describes using stories and story-telling techniques so that elementary professional school counselors can facilitate brief, narrative counseling. These approaches help counselors and students build rapport while assisting in understanding and externalizing the problem. Additionally, these interventions may help generate ideas for…

This article outlines practical techniques for developing literacy skills in users of high-tech speech-generating augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices. The recommended strategies are intended for general classroom teachers who teach literacy skills to students with typical speech. Many students who use high-tech AAC devices…

This paper argues that lecturer development programmes can best be evaluated by theory-informed, contextualised evaluations involving a structured approach. The self-knowledge obtained by course teams who engage with such an approach outweighs wisdom received from external evaluators within large-scale evaluation initiatives, although these can…

The Great Plains Distance Education Alliance (Great Plains IDEA) emphasizes the importance of a collaborative environment for instructors and students in distance education. The authors highlight a number of important principles for distance-education programs and point out similarities and differences when compared to traditional face-face-to…

Conceptions of literacy in the secondary English language arts classroom today have expanded in multiple directions, moving far beyond former emphases on reading comprehension and writing ability. This article presents the efforts of two secondary English language arts teachers in the Midwestern United States to expand the meaning of literacy in…