Minkel Walter, recently read about a school district in Texas that's supplying its fifth- and sixth-grade students with laptops. Along with electronic copies of textbooks, the laptops will also contain a "library" of about 2,000 books--"classics of Western civilization"--packaged by Vital Source Technologies and sold for about 5200 per computer.…

When tasked with selecting a Course Management System (CMS), the first step many responsible colleges, universities and consortia take is to name a selection committee of faculty, administration, students and possibly IT staff. They do some Web searching and talk to colleagues, friends and counterparts at other institutions. This same committee…

Simple problems of discrete-time optimal control can be solved using a standard spreadsheet software. The employed-solution method of backward iteration is intuitively understandable, does not require any programming skills, and is easy to implement so that it is suitable for classroom exercises with rational-expectations models. The author…

Demonstration authoring software is a tool for creating Flash-based multimedia movies. This document describes how demonstration authoring software was created for training in a library at the University of Colorado.

Accompanying the explosive growth of the Internet have been concerns about protecting children from viewing pornographic and other harmful images through cyberspace. In the past few years, Congress has passed several acts to censor Internet sites available to children, but only the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) has received Supreme…

Children with severe learning difficulties who fail to begin word recognition can learn to recognise pictures and symbols relatively easily. However, finding an effective means of using pictures to teach word recognition has proved problematic. This research explores the use of morphing software to support the transition from picture to word…

Major educational policy groups call on learners to engage in inquiry-based activities. With a growing amount of information now available online, there is an increased focus on online inquiry where learners ask research questions; search digital libraries and other information sources; and read, assess, and synthesize that information.…

This article reviews the arguments for reporting effect size estimates as part of the statistical results in empirical studies. Following this review, formulas are presented for the calculation of major mean-difference and association-based effect size measures for t tests, one-way ANOVA, zero order correlation, simple regression, multiple…

Educators are required to combine their expertise and allow students to explore the different areas by using the method of collaboration in which teachers from different disciplines will create an environment where each will use their expert skills. The collaboration of a computer teacher with an art teacher resulted in the creation of Layout and…

The three utility commercial programs available on the Internet are like software packages purchased through a vendor or the Internet, shareware programs are developed by individuals and distributed via the Internet for a small fee to obtain the complete version of the product, and freeware programs are distributed via the Internet free of cost.…

As geometry involves lot of graphics, it acts as a link between mathematical model and real-world phenomena. An effective tool like geometry software can help students to explore the ellipse.

One of the most remarkable devices embedded in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is known as the spinner. Its staggering simplicity is undoubtedly its strength. As an incrementing device that allows graphs to dance across the screen, it gives the concept of variability a whole new meaning. Spinners and their close cousins scroll bars can be grabbed…

Beginning with Version 11, SPSS implemented the MIXED procedure, which is capable of performing many common hierarchical linear model analyses. The purpose of this article was to provide a tutorial for performing cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses using this popular software platform. In doing so, the authors borrowed heavily from Singer's…

The author discusses the issue of copyright, oldies, and digital preservation. He examines efforts being made to create digital sound repositories for music record prior to 1970 at such places as Yale, Syracuse, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress. These issues are explored by contrasting the music industry's concern for loss…

The Golden Ratio is sometimes called the "Golden Section" or the "Divine Proportion", in which three points: A, B, and C, divide a line in this proportion if AC/AB = AB/BC. "Donald in Mathmagicland" includes a section about the Golden Ratio and the ratios within a five-pointed star or pentagram. This article presents two computing exercises that…