This column posits enhancing professional development through uses of digital tools to create professional learning communities (PLCs) designed to support collective inquiry and action research leading to schoolwide improvement. These digital tools include a social networking/discussion forum for teacher collaboration; teachers' individual…

The introduction of an online learning management system (LMS) raises a number of complex issues involving institutional responses at various levels to the adoption and diffusion of technological change. Issues include those related to governance, management and technical support, as well as to core learning and teaching matters associated with…

Topic Maps, ISO/IEC 13250 standard, are designed to facilitate the organization and navigation of large collections of information objects by creating meta-level perspectives of their underlying concepts and relationships. The underlying structure of concepts and relations is expressed by domain ontologies. The Topics Maps technology can become…

This report describes the development in 1986 of a management information system by the Sacramento City (California) Unified School District for use in high schools. A nine-page attachment, which comprises two-thirds of the report, offers profiles of selected schools drawn from the databases. Data sets of 200 information items, collected from all…

Using the experience of the University of Illinois at Springfield's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the as a foundation for discussion, this paper addresses the provision of student support services to distant students within the context of development and expansion. Specific issues for consideration include: integrating student support…

The E-School Technology Innovation Challenge Grant of 1996 was the genesis of the Department of Education's (DOE's) efforts to initiate a multi-prong approach to bring standards-based curriculum to the children of Hawai'i and use technology to upgrade professional development for its teachers. In this article, the authors describe how various…