The recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (EASA), also known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), provided broad changes encompassing many areas of public education in the United States. Accountability, expansion of school choice, increased focus on reading skills, and greater flexibility for state…

This paper describes a study of students' perceptions of the impact of accessibility and interactivity on successful distance education in the Health Professions. The study utilized both quantitative and qualitative data to determine how students perceived issues of accessibility and interactivity affecting their success in distance courses. The…

Education can profit significantly from hypermedia and e-technologies. However, in the authors' experience, the majority of students having the choice of learning on the computer or from a printed script or book prefer the latter when it comes to "challenging" formal domains. For online learning material to be successful, its structure…

While electronic learning environments provide exciting possibilities for supporting learners, the design of the user interface is as yet little understood. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of specific usability attributes for online learning courses. A review of related papers on usability methods and learning theories…

The Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) Project was created by the U.S. Department of Education to address the need for newly certified teachers to be able to integrate technology in their first years of teaching. The U.S. Education Department's PT3 Program has provided funding for projects nationwide. At the School of Education…

This paper deals with a significant challenge in education today: the challenge to teach life long learning and critical thinking skills in Web-based environments. This is a challenge for two reasons. First, business and government are pressuring educational institutions to prepare employees who can think critically, solve a range of problems,…

This paper describes the design and implementation of a real time on-line collaboration tool, EDUCO. The main focus is to demonstrate how the tool is applied to a real life on-line distance education course, discuss the preliminary research findings of the qualitative empirical study, propose directions for future work and discuss implications.…

Web-based statistical instruction, like all statistical instruction, ought to focus on teaching the essence of the research endeavor: the exercise of reflective judgment. Using the framework of the recent report of the American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on Statistical Inference (Wilkinson and the APA Task Force on Statistical…

The purpose of this study is to identify university faculty concerns along with the degree of use of Web-based course tools to develop faculty support programs. The study borrows from both the Diffusion of Innovations Model (Rogers, 1983) and the Concerns Based Adoption Model (Hall & Hord, 1987) to develop faculty support programs that will help…

This booklet provides glimpses into the classrooms of real teachers at various stages of technology integration. The "Snapshots" offered in this document illustrate appropriate and creative uses of technology at many grade levels and within different subject areas. The Curriculum Snapshots are organized by grade level (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12). Each…

Postmodernism is a concept that is still emerging into the cultural dialogue and slowly contributing to the changing notions about educational processes. Through an original interpretation and multimedia presentation of a classic children's story, "The Three Little Pigs (Revisited)," three such developing notions--learner-initiated…

Due to the implementation of a credit-based system in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, it is anticipated that a large number of students will be taking some popular common service computing subjects. These subject modules may be taught by different teachers; thus there is a need to ensure that students are taught uniformly with the same…

One of the challenges in teaching a hybrid Basic Course in Communication is the wide variety of topics that can be covered in one semester. Two basic course instructors have found that their recently opened Basic Course computer lab gave them the opportunity to develop interdisciplinary assignments to help more efficiently address various…

The purpose of this study was to determine Tapp Middle School's instructional technology staff development needs, determine sustainability and staff development costs, and develop a long-range comprehensive instructional technology staff development action plan. This study also focuses on the student as the customer who deserves access to the best…

Four issues of "ACTTive Technology" include major articles, editorials, suggested curriculum activities, reviews of software and educational media, early childhood and technology news items, and conference calendars. Major articles include: "Why Use a Switch or TouchWindow?" (Linda Robinson and Carol Schneider); "Teachers Identify Important…