While the attention of researchers has focused on video games, texting and, more recently, the growth of social networking sites such as "Bebo.com" and "Facebook", virtual worlds have emerged as a site of significant cultural and textual relevance for young people. A total of 6.2 million children aged between six and 12 years of age ventured into…

In instructional communication settings, instructional explanations play an important role. Despite the very common use of instructional explanations, empirical studies show that very often, they have no positive effects on learning outcomes. This ineffectiveness might be due to mental passivity of the recipient learners that leads to shallow…

The Association Supporting Computer Users in Education (ASCUE) is a group of people interested in small college computing issues. It is a blend of people from all over the country who use computers in their teaching, academic support, and administrative support functions. Begun in 1968 as the College and University Eleven-Thirty Users' Group…

Rural educators face many barriers when trying to participate in high quality professional development, including isolation, funding issues, distance, and lack of temporary replacements. Technological solutions can assist rural educators in overcoming these barriers. Participating in on-line professional learning communities can provide New…

A growing number of researchers claim that web-based communication tools, such as weblogs (blogs for short), have the potential to transform teaching and learning in schools across grade levels. Yet, much of this research lacks evidence of what instructors and students are actually doing with the technology, including the circumstances under which…

Communication between home and school is good for kids. Keeping families up-to-date about upcoming events is important, but it's not enough to fully engage parents as partners. When schools and families really work together, that sets the stage for all kinds of benefits. The National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education reports that…

When it comes to using social media technology for alcohol, drug abuse, and violence prevention, Thomas Workman, at Baylor College of Medicine's John M. Eisenberg Center for Clinical Decisions and Communications Science, points out that social media is interactive. This means that a person is entering a conversation rather than a declaration, and…

The aim of this study was to identify when and how the interactive whiteboard (IWB) functioned as a productive tool that impacted student learning in mathematics. Using video data, field notes, and interview transcripts from 1 school year in two optimal case study classrooms, we were able to examine the unique opportunities afforded by the size of…

Nowadays organizations strive to find the ways to communicate with their target audiences by using varied advertising mediums because of the developments on the information communication technologies and the globalization. In this context, like the other institutions, the distance education institutions has to execute communication activities by…

Michigan State University Extension conducted its first virtual conference, attended by more than 600 staff, with a weeklong menu of over 100 online meetings and learning sessions. Providing multiple types of pre-conference hands-on training to small groups using Adobe Connect Pro was an important key to success. Other success factors were pre and…

This article focuses specifically on teacher candidates' preconceptions about poetry and poetry teaching and how these preconceptions shift as they work through various tasks on a wiki. Through an analysis of their definitions of poetry and ideas about poetry pedagogy captured in online discussion, survey, and interview responses, the authors…

Less than a decade ago, school district technology-use policies essentially focused on school computer labs and the prohibition of cell phones on campus. Today, as schools integrate technology into classroom instruction and school operations, districts are moving quickly to implement policies to encourage digital citizenship throughout the school…

In some theories of sentence comprehension, linguistically relevant lexical knowledge, such as selectional restrictions, is privileged in terms of the time-course of its access and influence. We examined whether event knowledge computed by combining multiple concepts can rapidly influence language understanding even in the absence of selectional…

Our purpose was to illustrate the process by which caring relationships between students and their teacher educator developed in the context of preservice reading preparation that made use of online communication as one class activity. Describing the development of caring relationships between three students and their teacher, we showed that…

Online discussions have been widely utilized as an educational activity, and much research has been conducted on the process and behaviors involved in asynchronous discussions. However, research on behavioral patterns in learners' synchronous discussions, including the process of social knowledge construction and project coordination is limited.…