The purpose of this study is to investigate the interaction between discipline and personality in a blended classroom using the community of inquiry model. To this end, a factorial ANOVA is used to determine the main effects of the high and low of each personality trait as well as the four different clusters of discipline on the presences. The…

This study explores electronic portfolios and their potential to assess student literacy and selfregulated learning in elementary-aged children. Assessment tools were developed and include a holistic rubric that assigns a mark from 1 to 5 to self-regulated learning (SRL) and a mark to literacy, and an analytical rubric measuring multiple…

Backchannel technology can be used to allow students in large lecture courses to communicate with each other and the instructor during the delivery of lecture content and class discussions. It can also be utilized by instructors to capture, summarize, and integrate student questions, ideas, and needs into course content both immediately and…

More than a decade after Prensky's influential articulation of digital natives and immigrants, disagreement exists around these characterizations of students and the impact of such notions within higher education. Perceptions of today's undergraduate learners as tech-savvy "digital natives" (Prensky, 2001a), who both want and need the…

This study seeks to design and facilitate active reading among secondary school students with an online annotation tool--Diigo. Two classes of different academic performance levels were recruited to examine their annotation behavior and perceptions of Diigo. We wanted to determine whether the two classes differed in how they used Diigo; how they…

This study documents to what extent writing on a blog in a networked learning environment could influence the affective variables of elementary-school students' writing. The framework is grounded more specifically in theory of self-determination (Deci & Ryan, 1985), relationship to writing (Chartrand & Prince, 2009) and the transactional…

This paper examines theoretical, pedagogical, and technological differences between two technologies that have been used in undergraduate interprofessional health sciences at the University of Toronto. One, a learning management system, WebCT 2.0, supports online coursework. The other, a Knowledge Building environment, Knowledge Forum 2.0,…

This study examined growth in graphical literacy for students contributing to an online, multimedia, communal environment as they advanced their understanding of biology, history and optics. Their science and history studies started early in Grade 3 and continued to the end of Grade 4; students did not receive instruction in graphics production,…

Recent inquiry has identified the establishment of positive self-efficacy beliefs as an important component in the overall process of successfully preparing new teachers for the classroom. Similarly, in-service teachers who reported high levels of efficacy for teaching confirmed feeling confident in their ability to design and implement enriching…

This paper outlines the findings of a study that explores perspectives of e-learning for aboriginal students in five coastal communities in Labrador, Canada. The rural nature of many communities in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, coupled with a dramatically declining enrollment, has resulted in expanding use of e-learning as a means to…

Electronic portfolios offer many advantages to their paper-based counterparts, including, but not limited to working on ICT skills, adding multimedia and easier sharing of the portfolio. Previous research showed that the quality of a portfolio does not depend on the medium used. In this article the perceived support for self-reflection of an…

Questions about the suitability of cognitively-oriented instructional approaches for students of different academic levels are frequently raised by teachers and researchers. This study examined student participation in knowledge-building discourse in two implementations of a short inquiry unit focusing on environmental problems. Participants in…

This research explores the idea of embedding and linking to existing content in learning object repositories and investigates teacher-designer use of learning objects within one high school mathematics course in an online school. This qualitative case study supports and extends the learning object literature, and brings forward context-specific…

The discourse about information technology is often overlooked by researchers and scholars as a means of understanding the recent process of computerization in education. The research explores this phenomenon through a comparative discourse analysis of primary and secondary school teachers and promoters of ICT integration. The results show that…

This paper examined a particular online learning activity, embedded within a computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment incorporated as part of the larger context of participation in a unique national agricultural leadership development program. Process outcomes such as a high level of collaboration and active peer facilitation…