Digital curricula can constrain teachers with ready-made instructional materials. The authors used Mathematics Teaching Practices (MTPs) to modify a digital curriculum to engage students in more thoughtful and meaningful lessons. In this article, the authors visit one of their third-grade classrooms, in which they used the prescriptive digital…

Real-world design settings can be complex, ill-structured, open and typically uncertain and/or ambiguous about their goals and solution paths. This study contributes to understanding how to work with these types of problems in a course project setting. The main objective of the study is to identify, propose and validate a set of practical…

School-based agricultural education programs have the potential to prepare students for successful lives and enhance career skills related to agriculture. For students to achieve instructional goals, they must have relevant materials. The teacher's thoughts on how a subject should be taught influences their choice of curriculum resources, as well…

Arts integration research has focused on documenting how the teaching of specific art forms can be integrated with "core" academic subject matters (e.g. science, mathematics and literacy). However, the question of how the teaching of multiple art forms themselves can be integrated in schools remains to be explored by educational…

The paper describes the procedure model AKUE, which aims at the improvement and assurance of quality and cost efficiency in the context of the introduction of e-learning and the development of digital learning material. AKUE divides the whole planning and implementation process into four different phases: analysis, conception, implementation, and…

This paper presents an advanced variant of learning programming by the use of the Internet and multimedia. It describes the development of a blended learning environment, which, in addition to classroom (face-to-face) lessons, introduces lessons delivered over the Internet: the use of multimedia teaching material with completely dynamic…

This article presents a design-based research study of the implementation of an energy unit developed for middle school students. The unit utilized Google Earth and a geographic information system (GIS) to support student understanding of the world's energy resources and foster their spatial thinking skills. Findings from the prototype study…

Despite of much focus on professional development aimed specifically at developing teachers' technology integration skills, rigorous studies of effective PD (professional development) are lacking. Evidence is also lacking on how these skills can best be integrated with pedagogical and content knowledge to improve student learning. The purpose of…

Software for text processing and presentation design is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Nevertheless, it is difficult to find a good solution for collaborative writing of technical course material, allowing the creation of high quality lecture notes and presentation slides from a single source. This article presents a new editing framework…

The development of inquiry and project-based materials is challenging in many ways, not the least of which is the design of supports for teachers implementing such materials. We report on the design of educative and just-in-time teacher supports for an online project-based unit in ocean science. The teacher supports were visible as tabs on the…

The Ford Motor Company launched a new pre-engineering curriculum for high schools in the Fall of 2004. Building on an earlier manufacturing program, the development process for the Ford Partnership for Advanced Studies took approximately three years. Ford and the course designers wanted the new program to incorporate the best principles and…

This bulletin has been prepared to assist teachers and persons serving on curriculum committees in improving the quality of unit teaching and planning for elementary schools. The suggestions and illustrations grow out of a study made by the author of over 500 social studies units which were published during the last few years. They also result…

Within primary and secondary school technology education, engineering has been proposed as an avenue to bring about technological literacy. Different initiatives such as curriculum development projects (i.e., Project ProBase and Project Lead The Way) and National Science Foundation funded projects such as the National Center for Engineering and…

This qualitative study examined the use of WebQuests as a teaching tool in problem-based elementary methods courses. We explored the potential of WebQuests to address three dilemmas faced in teacher education: (a) modeling instruction that is based on current learning theory and research-based practices, (b) providing preservice teachers with…

Collaboration among faculty can enhance the learning experience for preservice teachers and reinforce the integral role of technology in teaching, learning, and professional development in social studies education. Organized around the Performance Profiles outlined by the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS[middle dot]T),…