For many years, practitioners have heard that middle level teachers are teachers of reading. As the standards movement gains strength, it is even more crucial that teachers explicitly teach key vocabulary that makes their students "insiders" when it comes to understanding the content areas. This article reminds the reader of the principles for…

Around the globe people are confronted daily with intransigent problems of space and place. Educators have historically called for place-based or place-conscious education to introduce pedagogies that will address such questions as how to develop sustainable communities and places. These calls for place-conscious education have included liberal…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of Merrill's five star system using award-winning online courses. We compared Merrill's rubric with other recognized rubrics to explore the convergence of course awards with high scores on the Merrill's system, and convergence of scores on the Merrill system with relevant…

This paper is a review of the literature related to teaching science through designing technology. The premise of this method is that designing technology presents the students with the context through which they can apply the science concepts they learned and thus enhancing their understanding of these concepts. Despite the promise of this…

The general pedagogical knowledge of teachers is not often investigated in comparison to content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. In this article, a more comprehensive outlook on teachers' skills and knowledge without regard to subject-specific nuances is discussed in relation to classroom management strategies, the organization of…

Openers, or brief activities that initiate a class, routinely take up classroom time each day yet little is known about how to design these activities so they contribute to student learning. This study uses technology-enhanced learning environments to explore new opportunities to transform Openers from potentially busy work to knowledge generating…

The paper analyses the problems in selecting and integrating tools for delivering basic programming knowledge at the university level. Discussion and analysis of teaching the programming disciplines, the main principles of study programme design, requirements for teaching tools, methods and corresponding languages is presented, based on literature…

The purpose of this study was to examine the social justice principles embedded in California State University (CSU) Educational Administration Preparation Programs. More specifically, this study explored the intended, implemented, and assessed curriculum relative to social justice and critical consciousness, and investigated if differences exist…

The College and Career Ready Standards of the CCSS articulate a range of expectations regarding what students should be able to do with regards to academic vocabulary: (1) Interpret technical, connotative, and figurative meanings of words and phrases; (2) Analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone; (3) Determine or clarify the meaning…

Current e-learning forms are commonly based on improving the learning process through the enhancement of certain skills in students, such as collaborative, competitive or problem-based learning. However, it seems that there is still no e-learning "formula" that gathers the implementation of a number of more generic educational principles in a…

The purpose of this article is to introduce and explain a cooperative learning technique, Academic Controversy (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1996), also known as Cooperative Controversy, Structured Controversy and Structured Academic Controversy, that has potential for use in intercultural education and has support in both research and theory.…

Many physics teachers would agree that students making real-world connections is a critical aspect of learning physics, but what does this really mean? Merely seeing a real-world application of a physical concept does not necessarily allow students to incorporate the concept into the way they perceive their world. It is not just seeing the…

Collaborative technologies offer a range of new ways of supporting learning by enabling learners to share and exchange both ideas and their own digital products. This paper considers how best to exploit these opportunities from the perspective of learners' needs. New technologies invariably excite a creative explosion of new ideas for ways of…

This booklet is about the most effective methods of teaching. It has been prepared for inclusion in the Educational Practices Series developed by the International Academy of Education and distributed by the International Bureau of Education and the Academy. As part of its mission, the Academy provides timely syntheses of research on educational…

At each Association for Business Communication (ABC) conference the authors have attended in the past 2 to 3 years, the many presentations focusing on social networking, blogs, wikis, and various Web 2.0 technologies have captured their attention. They welcome the wonderful, new communication tools that increasingly allow people to communicate and…