Whoever said "Distance education begins in the 10th row" was taking a jab at the comatose kids at the back of his classroom, but the comment also taps into the old image of distance learners as disengaged themselves. That was then. Today, distance-learning programs are booming, in part due to demographic realities but also because recent advances…

While no one agrees exactly when it will happen, expectations are high that the digital textbook market will eventually elbow print textbooks off the shelves. When that day finally comes, what happens to the campus bookstore? It is hard to imagine a college or university without one, but in a world where most students are downloading their…

It has been 41 years since the late Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson launched the first nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment, known as Earth Day. The event was a national "teach-in" about environmental causes, and it is widely considered the spark that ignited the modern environmental education movement. Within months,…

The for-profit sector of higher education has generated some disturbing headlines recently. Widely publicized charges of predatory recruiting practices have prompted new regulations and provided fuel for scorching criticism of the entire business model. But while the spotlight is focused on what for-profits are doing wrong, are people overlooking…

What would an educator do with $650 million? Better yet, what "should" he/she do with $650 million? No, this is no game show. It's a real-life challenge posed to school districts nationwide in the year since President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The bill dedicates more than $90 billion to education, with…

Few computing devices have sparked the burning gizmo lust ignited by the iPad. Apple's latest entry into the tablet PC market didn't generate much heat when it was first unveiled in January, but by April 3, the day of the official release, feverish customers were mobbing Apple stores. The company claims to have sold 300,000 iPads by midnight on…

John Abdelmalak, director of technology for the School District of the Chathams, was pretty sure it was time to jump on the virtualization bandwagon last year when he invited Dell to conduct a readiness assessment of his district's servers. When he saw just how little of their capacity was being used, he lost all doubt. Abdelmalak is one of many…

This article features Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI), the nation's first-ever statewide 1-to-1 laptop program which marks its seventh birthday by expanding into high schools, providing an occasion to celebrate--and to examine the components of its success. The plan to put laptops into the hands of every teacher and student in grades 7…

The hottest technology trends in higher education today can be boiled down to two roughly converse capabilities: the delivery of time- and space-shifted instruction to individual students (think podcasts), and the coordination of disparate-source content within the classroom, for enriched group experiences. The first is taking advantage of…

It was the perfect Halloween project. Each class would construct a three-dimensional "monster" out of common classroom materials (construction paper, cardboard boxes, tape, markers, glue, string, etc.), then write down instructions for building the monster and send them off to another class in the district, or in some other district, or even some…

A growing number of K-12 districts are taking the open source plunge, both to cope with tight budgets and to escape proprietary vendor lock-in and expensive upgrade cycles. With the potential for cost savings and a growing number of educational applications, open source software is proving to be an effective alternative for schools willing to make…

With budgets and staff stretched thin, schools are turning tech-savvy students into technology leaders and a popular, important source of IT support. Providing professional tech support is a very expensive a proposition, so districts from Tupelo to Greenville, and from Hattiesburg to Columbia, are enlisting students to fill the gaps. This article…

Data integration is one of the single most challenging tasks any district can face. Fortunately for school districts throughout the country with data scattered in disparate systems, an open specification known as the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) is mitigating that challenge. SIF has emerged as a cornerstone of K-12 data warehousing,…

Although a seemingly good idea, electronic portfolios have to date failed to gain significant traction in higher education. Institutions with ePortfolio implementations routinely report high numbers of accounts on their campuses, but few believe that those numbers are a meaningful reflection of actual usage. Change is in the air for the…

This article reports the potential of online role-playing games to be a powerful tool for English as a second language (ESL) learning. When Professor Edd Schneider and game designer Kai Zheng suggested to attendees gathered in San Francisco last spring for the annual Game Developers Conference that massively multiplayer online role-playing games,…