At the Orange County Public School District in Orlando, Florida, assessing reading skills among the youngest students used to be quite a process. Relying on rudimentary products such as paper and pencils, the strategy hinged on the bubble sheets teachers administered to students once a year. After teachers scored the exams, they sent them to the…

School districts discover that the secret to implement a good laptop program is to find a good partner. This article features educational partnerships that provide tools and support districts need to roll out successful laptop programs. At Cincinnati Country Day School district administrators joined with Toshiba and a solution provider to provide…

Science educators are often among the first to use emerging technologies in the classroom and laboratory. For the technologically savvy science teacher, the handheld computer is a terrific tool. A handheld computer is a portable electronic device that helps organize (via calendars, contact lists, to-do lists) and integrate electronic data…

The rapid growth of charter schools has encouraged innovation and led to new models of schooling. Foremost among these are cyber charter schools where students learn from computer-based lessons beyond the walls of the traditional schoolhouse setting. The authors present the case of cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania. They describe how cyber…

This chapter describes Clemson University's Laptop Faculty Development Program and its assessment, offering the program as one model for designing faculty development to successfully implement laptop mandates. The chapter also acquaints readers with the many types of in-class, laptop-based activities that meet best-practice criteria for effective…

The Internet is no longer only a place to research information. It is now also a forum through which users can publish and disseminate their own writing. Richardson describes some of the main tools that make this new "Read/Write Web" work--blogs, wikis, really simple syndication, and podcasting--and gives examples of how each can be used to…

An overly narrow and specialized focus on technology in schools discourages the use of computers to promote higher-order thinking. Many districts have concentrated on skills training, failed to supply such necessary supports as professional development, conflated technology use with instructional quality, and classified all software applications…

See how several educators are exploring the potential of technology in their classrooms. Citing several Web sites that provide and catalog primary source documents, two teachers show how classrooms can use digitized documents as historians and scholars do. An English teacher in Israel uses technology to engage students as foreign ambassadors. One…

This paper suggests that knowledge of the school mathematics curriculum, as one of the key components of teachers' education, can be extended to include concepts and structures that generally belong to hidden domains of the curriculum. Motivated by work done with elementary pre-service teachers in a mathematics course employing a hidden…

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…

Society today is facing unprecedented challenges. Organizations are facing internal and external pressures from globalization, changing technologies, reassessment of mission and values, changing demographics and competition. Such pressures are indicative of a transformation from an industrial society to a knowledge society. Organizations can…

This article presents a framework for the cognitive diagnosis of learners' errors in an interactive learning activity occurring in an intelligent learning environment. The proposed framework supports the implementation of an authoring tool. This tool helps instructional designers to specify the features of a component for cognitive diagnosis. Two…

Professional Development is an ideal way to ensure that early childhood teachers have the skills and knowledge they need to improve student achievement. Unfortunately, many teachers report that the workshops and in-services typically offered are of minimal value because they often do not relate to what is actually going on in their classrooms…

Within the university the introduction of computers is creating a new criterion of differentiation between those who as a matter of course become integrated in the technocratic trend deriving from the daily use of these machines and those who become isolated by not using them. This difference increases when computer science and communications…

Heart monitors, pedometers, and now virtual reality-based equipment (e.g., Cyberbikes, "Dance Dance Revolution") have been embraced by physical educators as technologies worth using in the physical education program; however, the use of computers (be it a desktop, notebook, or handheld) in the physical education instructional program, has not been…