In this article, we describe just one activity from an interdisciplinary social justice unit taught to two fifth-grade social studies classes with the use of Cynthia Kadohata's multicultural historical fiction novel "Weedflower." Often, our younger students feel their voices are silenced...their messages are not heard. Like many of…

In some ways, the project which the author's class had undertaken--creating collaborative plays about issues important in students' lives--was going very well. The students, 20 high school seniors, seemed engaged and invested in the work, from brainstorming and improvising to writing and revising. The class had read and watched a variety of…

Informed by sociocultural theory and guided especially by "collective scaffolding", this study investigated the nature of computer-mediated interaction of three groups of English as a Foreign Language students when they performed collaborative writing tasks using wikis. Nine college students from a Chinese university participated in the…

This article develops a theoretical understanding of the processes involved in the co-construction of a written text by a teacher and student from a Vygotskian perspective. Drawing on cultural-historical and sociocultural theories of writing and Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), this case study of a student and teacher…

This study aims at knowing how students experience wikis while they are involved in a problem solving science activity. The study took place in a physics and chemistry 8th grade class (13 years old), where teacher implemented a problem solving activity about acid-base reactions, using a wiki. Participants were 20 students, of which 12 were female…

Social media provide a multitude of opportunities for knowledge contribution and sharing. However, the content reliability issue has caused comprehensive attention, especially on credible social media, such as Wikipedia. Despite Wikipedia's success with the open editing model, dissenting voices give rise to unreliable content due to two…

Because MediaWiki is not appropriate for use in the classroom setting due to its decentralization, arbitrariness, and sharing, its flexible characteristics complicate concepts of practical design when applying MediaWiki in a mandatory writing context. This dissertation identifies a need to add extensions to facilitate increased accountability,…

Preservice teachers need opportunities to understand the special needs of English Language Learners (ELLs) before they begin to teach them, yet frequently their exposure is limited to a journal article or college lecture. This collective case study aimed to explore the experiences of 17 American, native English-speaking preservice teachers as they…

Language teaching has passed through a long way in search of a remedy for language learners and teachers. Countless theories, approaches, and methods have been recommended. With all these, however, more inclusive L2 theories and models ought to be considered to come up with real classroom practices. One of such crucial practices is authenticity,…

This qualitative exploratory single-case study was designed to examine and understand the use of volunteer community participants as software developers and other project related roles, such as testers, in completing a web-based application project by a non-profit organization. This study analyzed the strategic decision to engage crowd…

Using John Creswell's Research Process Cycle as a framework, this article describes various web-based collaborative technologies useful for enhancing the organization and efficiency of educational research. Visualization tools (Cacoo) assist researchers in identifying a research problem. Resource storage tools (Delicious, Mendeley, EasyBib)…

In response to the needs for understanding teaching practices and approaches with a technology tool in actual elementary classrooms, this paper examines the perspectives of American elementary teachers who use classroom wikis. Specially, it examines three main ideas: (a) teaching approaches and strategies across subject areas in the primary and…

Knowledge production in South Africa remains framed by the legacies of apartheid. Developing emerging authors and local knowledges through co-authorship between supervisors and post graduate students is an important strategy aimed at challenging these legacies. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with students and supervisors to explore their…

One of the main barriers to the reuse of Open Educational Resources (OER) is language (OLnet, 2009). OER may be available but in a language that users cannot access, so a preliminary step to reuse is their translation or localization. One of the obvious solutions to the vast effort required to translate OER is to crowd-source the translation, as…

This paper explores the use of emerging Cloud technologies that support real-time online collaboration. It considers the extent to which these technologies can be leveraged to develop complex skillsets supporting interaction between multiple learners in online spaces. In a pilot study that closely examines how groups of learners translate two…