This paper reports a test on the feasibility and educational value of probeware and associated instructional materials in middle school science education. We addressed feasibility through consideration of costs, teacher professional development, and instructional design. In order to test our approach, we developed 2 middle school science…

The effect of intervening use of molecular visualization software was tested on 73 first-year general chemistry students. Pretests and posttests included both traditional multiple-choice questions and model-building activities. Overall students improved after working with the software, although students performed less well on the model-building…

Increasingly, technology skills are becoming central to academic and economic success. More and more technological tools are becoming a vehicle for teaching and learning and a vehicle for buying and selling goods. However, research continues to show that women lag behind men in PC-ownership regardless of social economic status (SES) or education…

As a science subject leader and year 6 teacher in North Bristol, the author has spent the last few months exploring how an interactive whiteboard (IWB) can be used to teach science skills, particularly those that are repeatedly highlighted as problematic, such as analysis and evaluation of evidence. The IWB came with software called…

The Virtual Grand Tour (VGT) is a paradigm for integrating a presentation of an overview of a larger subject with the possibility of launching at any time an exploratory study of a given sub-topic. The name derives from the paradigm's emulation of those 18th-century travels intended to educate (especially) young, affluent British men; today, with…

Automated techniques for finding plagiarism in student source code submissions have been in use for over 20 years and there are many available engines and services. This paper reviews the literature on the major modern detection engines, providing a comparison of them based upon the metrics and techniques they deploy. Generally the most common and…

This paper serves as a brief description of research into the use of professional level music software as a learning tool for creativity and composition by primary school children. The research formed the basis of a Master of Information Technology in Education degree at the University of Melbourne. The paper examines the physical environment, the…

The study "New Media in the Humanities: from metaphors of inevitability to metaphors of possibility," argues that using digital technologies in humanities classrooms (at the post-secondary level) is transformative for both students and professors. It begins by identifying and then allaying the fears that scholars in the humanities…

In an era of state budget cuts and a tight economy, distributed learning is often seen as a way to address the needs of colleges and universities looking for additional revenue sources. Likewise, budding virtual universities, consortia, and corporate partnerships are now providing new ways for institutions to share resources across campuses. The…

The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. Particularly, applications should be able to provide individually optimized access to information by taking the individual needs and requirements of the users into account. In this paper we propose a…

Teachers tend to design worksheets to assist their students to develop their spatial skills. Many secondary schools students may not have sufficient concrete experiences to tackle abstract reasoning in geometrical concepts competently. In addition, students who are non-visual and spatial learners may have difficulties in learning geometrical…

This paper presents the multimedia product for teaching Natural Sciences to 10-12 years old children. In this product three pedagogical agents, Teacher and two pupils guide the learner through the virtual environment. The inclusion of a team of pedagogical agents permits us to create a micro-model of lesson activity and gives a reliable support of…

This paper describes a multi-agent approach that aims at supporting learners involved in a collective activity. We consider pedagogical situations where students have to explicitly define the articulation of their collective work and then achieve the different tasks they have defined. Our objective is to support these students by taking some of…

With the infusion of the multimedia technology into the education arena, traditional educational materials can be translated into interactive electronic form through the use of multimedia authoring tools. This has allowed teachers to design and incorporate multimedia elements into the content to convey the message in a multi-sensory learning…

This study examined perceptions regarding intimate partner abuse (IPV) in a largely Latino community in New Jersey through focus groups with Latino community members and key informant interviews with providers of services to this population. Questions examined definitions of partner abuse; perceptions of factors contributing to, or protecting…