The virtual laboratories developed by a life sciences department at a public university in the US were designed for use by college students enrolled in an introductory biology course. The results analyses conducted to examine their effectiveness indicated that self-selected users of the virtual laboratories outperformed non-users on laboratory…

Solving true problems requires persistence. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) states that "problem solving means engaging in a task for which the solution method is not known in advance. In order to find a solution, students must draw on their knowledge, and through this process they will often develop new mathematical…

There are so many great ways to extend oneself professionally--or personally--over the summer. This paper presents several opportunities for summer 2009: (1) The Teacher-to-Teacher Initiative; (2) Courage to Teach; (3) University of South Carolina's Summer Institute in Computer Science; (4) Online Program in Online Teaching; and (5) College Board…

School districts across the country have always had to do more with less. Funding goes only so far, leaving administrators and IT staff to find innovative ways to save money while maintaining a high level of academic quality. Creating virtual servers accomplishes both tasks, district technology personnel say. Virtual environments not only allow…

We consider what a concern for social justice in terms of social inclusion might mean for teacher education, both practising and prospective, with particular reference to the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in mathematics education taking place at a borderland school. Our discussion proceeds through the following steps: (1)…

It has been reported that as many as fifty percent of adults, including first-year University students, have some sort of computer-related phobia. This report demonstrates that the use of computers still has some unpleasant side effects despite the Internet boom in the past decade. Past research shows that computer anxiety influences how users…

Students learn about physical laws and the scientific method when they analyze experimental data in a laboratory setting. Three common sources exist for the experimental data that they analyze: (1) "hands-on" measurements by the students themselves, (2) electronic transfer (by downloading a spreadsheet, video, or computer-aided data-acquisition…

At least 5.1 million U.S. students in kindergarten through 12th grade are English Language Learners today--10.5 percent of the entire student population. That amount is expected to grow to 25% by the year 2025. Numbers on the educational levels of these students' parents vary, though it appears that at least one-third of the heads-of-household…

This article looks at new information and communication technologies (ICTs) as sites of public pedagogy in that they produce particular forms of knowledge and literacies and reproduce representations that are always mediated through specific social relations. Public pedagogy as a process that constitutes a broader category beyond classroom…

Given the increasing influence of technology and the explosion in data collection demands, the acceptance and assimilation of new paradigms and technologies require today's educators, researchers, and evaluators to consider alternative tools, and apply them effectively. One of these alternatives, handheld computers, also known as personal digital…

Self-direction has been identified as a potential key to the success of professional development of teachers, especially those working in deprived environments. This paper develops a model for self-directed professional development using interview data from 55 Zimbabwean A-level Science and Mathematics teachers. It focuses on teachers' decisions…

Content analysis has dominated computer-mediated communication and educational technology studies for some time, and a review of its practices applied to online corpus of data or messages is overdue. We are confronted with complexity given the various foci, nuances and models for theorising learning and applying methods. One common suggestion to…

Students today live in technology-rich environments that shape their interactions with information and with each other. Children in the 21st century have access to a wide range of technology resources and tools for learning in real-life contexts. This study reports on a survey of 4000 North Carolina middle school students about what they need to…

In this study, an interpretive qualitative approach was employed to explore how pre-K children interact with educational software programs. This study addressed four aspects of children's computer use: mouse manipulation, interface interpretation, level of enthusiasm or disengagement, and human interaction between peers and between a child and…

It has long been known that when a cable of specified length is hung between two poles, it takes the shape of a catenary--a hyperbolic cosine function. In this paper, we study a variation of this problem. First, we consider a cable hanging between two poles in which one end of the cable is fixed to one pole; the other end of the cable runs over a…