Three hosted federated search tools, Follett One Search, Gale PowerSearch Plus, and WebFeat Express, were configured and implemented in a school library. Databases from five vendors and the OPAC were systematically searched. Federated search results were compared with each other and to the results of the same searches in the database's native…

Students in a 200-level Psychology course were enrolled in either a traditionally taught section or a web-enhanced section taught by the same instructor. Both sections were identical in content and format except for the addition of a learning management software package (PageOut[C]; McGraw-Hill Companies, 2002) in the web-enhanced section. PageOut…

Peer observation is increasingly a feature of higher education (HE) practice. We argue that the principal drivers of quality assurance and professional development apply online as offline, given the growing importance of e-learning and related teacher development needs. Currently, discussion is largely restricted to traditional classroom-based…

Prospective teachers' (PT) beliefs and views regarding teaching and learning affect the way they teach after they have graduated. Often, these views are a consequence of their past experience as pupils themselves. In recent years there has been a great effort toward changing the teaching and learning of mathematics, which raises the need to…

Virtual worlds are engaging, stimulating spaces where students can meet online for normal class activities, including lectures, discussions, case studies, projects, papers, exams, and labs. Classes are a mix of synchronous and asynchronous activity. A virtual world class differs from a traditional course management system, such as Blackboard or…

We discuss the introduction and teaching of partial differential equations (heat and wave equations) via modeling physical phenomena, using a new approach that encompasses constructing difference equations and implementing these in a spreadsheet, numerically solving the partial differential equations using the numerical differential equation…

This correlational study examined the relationship between gender and the students' attitude and prior knowledge of using one of the mathematical software programs (MATLAB). Participants were selected from one community college, one state university and one private college. Students were volunteers from three Calculus I classrooms (one class from…

This study documents problem solving approaches that high school students develop as a result of using systematically Cabri-Geometry software. Results show that the use of the software becomes an important tool for students to construct dynamic representations of the problems that were used to identify and examine different mathematical relations.…

Three sections of the same distance education class completed a series of Web-based concept map assessments using one of two methods. Open-ended maps applied in section 1 led students to conduct more relational thinking overall, but variance in map items was very high introducing more subjectivity in scoring. Pre-selected term mapping applied in…

Founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, YouTube has revolutionized the Internet, marking a change from the static Internet to the dynamic Internet. In this edition of Places to Go, Stephen Downes discusses how the rise of a ubiquitous media format--Flash video--has made YouTube's success possible and argues that Flash video has important…

Recently, attempts have been made to use Weblogs and other personal webpublishing technologies to support individual and social reflection in higher education. Weblogs can be highly individual and reflective in nature, and students' experiences and perceptions of the technology and practice are of primary importance in furthering educational use.…

Teacher education programs continue to be challenged to prepare prospective teachers to integrate technology into the day-to-day instruction and to strive to instil dispositions of openness to experimentation with ever-evolving technological tools and their pervasive impact on mathematics education. In this paper several activities are used to…

The purpose of this study is to examine the dynamics of online collaborative learning and communication media regarding team projects. Media richness and social presence theories are well-accepted rational theories that explain media choices and media behaviors, and serve as the theoretical framework. Quantitative and qualitative data collection…

In this note, we demonstrate with illustrations two different ways that MS Excel can be used to solve Linear Systems of Equation, Linear Programming Problems, and Matrix Inversion Problems. The advantage of using MS Excel is its availability and transparency (the user is responsible for most of the details of how a problem is solved). Further, we…

A tablet PC is a versatile computer that combines the computing power of a notebook with the pen functionality of a PDA (Cox and Rogers 2005b). The authors adopted tablet PC technology in order to improve the process and product of the lecture format in their chemistry, engineering, and physics courses. In this high-tech model, a single tablet PC…