There is no doubt that the Internet has made a profound effect on everyone's lives. It has also begun to liberate education from the confines of traditional time and space. The first incarnation of what everyone think of as K-12 virtual school appears to have been launched in the summer of 1995, with the CyberSchool Project in Eugene, Oregon.…

Over the past four years, educators and researchers from the University of Connecticut have worked with urban high-poverty schools to implement an alternative reading instruction program called the Schoolwide Enrichment Model in Reading (SEM-R). Based on Renzulli's Enrichment Triad Model, the SEM-R works through planned enrichment experiences to…

National health and fitness data suggests that a significant percentage of children are not on a pathway to leading healthy, physically active lifestyles. Many children are leading sedentary lifestyles due to a lack of opportunity, success, or self-motivation in physical activity. Programs that highlight the use of heart rate monitors offer a…

Special education teachers and individualized education program (IEP) team members throughout the country are struggling to make appropriate decisions regarding assistive technology (AT) for students with high incidence disabilities. Although numerous authors and organizations have developed tools to assist IEP teams when considering AT, the task…

The steps of implementing, analyzing, refining, and re-implementing a lesson is referred to as "lesson study." These steps formed the basis of a "workshop study" model that can be used to analyze a professional development workshop for the purposes of tailoring the content, resources, and collaborative efforts to better meet the needs of the…

In Fall 1996, Alabama Southern Community College formally created its Teaching/Learning Initiative. This was done by implementing bold new efforts that would lead ultimately to its focus to "customize learning" for every student based upon learning styles and preferences. The 1996 efforts included the following commitments: (1) To assess…

Researchers and teacher educators have called for contextualizing the learning of pedagogy and content within the complex context of schools. This account provides an overview of a web-based simulation called Sim-School[C] that provides a realistic framework for students to contextualize curricular decisions, differentiate instruction and reflect…

The purpose of this study was to explore the opinions and perspectives of special education teachers and parents of children in special education regarding the implementation of individualized instruction within the special education system in the People's Republic of China. The study group consisted of a random sample of 344 parents of children…

The purpose of this study was to systematically reflect upon my teaching practices, and to investigate the benefits of differentiated instruction using action research methods. This paper outlines the action research process, and is a case study examining the academic, social, and emotional progress of an advanced grade three learner involved in…

When the author became the principal of Citrus Middle School in 1998, it was the lowest performing school in the district. Students from Citrus were viewed as largely under-prepared, often read below grade level, had high drop-out rates, and were responsible for a significant amount of the gang activity on the school campus. She was also told that…

Assistive Technology (AT) devices and services have been legally mandated for several years. However, the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Act Amendments P.L. 105-17 (IDEA1997), which states that every student with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) must be considered for AT, had enormous implications impacting approximately six…

The purpose of this article is two-fold: (a) to present young adolescents' perceptions of the pedagogical conditions necessary for academic engagement; and (2) to consider an alternative way to access these important perceptions--through drawing. The authors examine here the results of a study in which they analyze middle school students'…

For many students, the longer they are in school, the less they trust in their ability to do math and fail to see why math is important to know. How can middle and secondary school educators turn that tendency around? Teachers can explore how their colleagues are answering that question and improving math programs in grades 7-12 in this next…

The Secretary amends the regulations governing programs administered under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) (referred to in these regulations as the Title I program) and the regulations governing programs under Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities…

In this article the authors review the reading status of urban learners and examine the role of phonemic awareness in reading acquisition. Their review indicates that phonemic awareness alone is not sufficient for reading acquisition, and that phonemic awareness in combination with alphabetic principle is needed to promote reading competence. The…