Students in physics courses often use whiteboards to brainstorm, solve problems, and present results to the rest of the class, particularly in courses involving collaborative small group work and whole class discussions. The whiteboards contain a valuable record of students' collaborative work. Once a whiteboard is erased, however, its contents…

What impact can Web 2.0 technologies, specifically social networking sites, have inside and outside the classroom? While participation within the Facebook community has grown exponentially across college campuses, participation in course-specific WebCT discussion forums has not necessarily followed suit. In response to this disparity, Jacob…

This article focuses on the potential of free tools, particularly inquiry tools for influencing participation in twenty-first-century learning in science, as well as influencing the development of communities around tools. Two examples are presented: one on the development of an open source tool for structured inquiry learning that can bridge the…

YouTube Fridays is a teaching tool that devotes the first five minutes of class each Friday to a YouTube video related to the course. Students select the videos, which expand the class's educational content in courses such as thermodynamics and material and energy balances. From assessments of two pilot studies using YouTube Fridays in Chemical…

The report, "The Ready to Teach Program: A Federal Initiative in Support of Online Courses for Teachers", describes the history of the Ready to Teach Program and its role as one of the solutions to the national need to increase the performance of teachers through professional development. The report describes selected findings from the Eisenhower…