Ten years into the new century, people are still trying to find the web 2.0 tools that best facilitate collaboration--one of the fundamentals of 21st century learning. As the number of tools continues to grow, and fuzzy terms like "cloud computing," "hashtags," and "synchronous live platforms" are introduced into the lexicon daily, even the most…

The easy availability of both web-based communication tools and classroom internet access presents teachers with myriad ways to engage their students in projects with kids all over the globe. Two teachers--English teacher Hagit Goldstein in Israel and Spanish teacher Allison Baugher in the US--were connecting students through an online classroom…

In the early days of computer technology, few, if any, school districts had chief information officers (CIOs). Information Technology (IT) was handled by computer or technology coordinators, many of whom were classroom teachers with passing interests in computers and associated high-tech gadgets and gizmos. As districts began embracing CIOs, the…

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,…

As technology grows more pervasive in education, the data recovery issues that school systems encounter are becoming increasingly problematic, as districts work to accommodate a range of concerns that do not encumber commercial businesses. State and federal laws often require schools to report on student populations and educational progress…

Teachers at Irvington High School in Fremont, California are looking for meaningful and relevant connections between what students are learning in the classroom and the job skills companies are looking for in the years to come. For Irvington, a Bay Area public high school serving about 2,000 students, that pursuit of a "logical link" led…

Discussion of the Florida Learning Support Systems, being developed by schools and businesses to better utilize information technology in education, focuses on use of the Internet as background communication, or communication between applications running on different computers without human intervention to develop new kinds of instructional and…

The author introduced a three-phase training model into a yearlong inservice technology training program, field testing the model with a group of elementary school teachers. Strategies, tips and insights are shared regarding each phase of the following phases: "Familiarization: Getting Acquainted with the Computer Environment"; "Utilization: Using…