Currently there is a global drive among political and educational institutions to implement geographic information system (GIS) practice in secondary schools. However, Geography teachers worldwide, including in South Africa, face significant practical challenges in this regard. Lack of curriculum aligned GIS resources, funds and teacher GIS…

There is a recognised need in mathematics teaching for new kinds of tasks which exploit the affordances provided by new technology. This paper focuses on the design of prediction tasks to foster student reasoning about exponential functions in a mathematics software environment. It draws on the first iteration of a design based research study…

Much of the previous research concerning student plagiarism has been conducted in Anglo-American settings. The present paper reports a case study of academic staff's perspectives upon student plagiarism at a university in Hong Kong. Based on interviews with 16 instructors, the study focused on the teachers' views and pedagogical practices,…

In the following design case, Learning Technologists (LT's) charged with developing a program for distance and blended learning describe the creation of an online module for staff development that helps lecturers to develop their online teaching skills. Using the Community of Inquiry Framework, the LT's structured an environment in which staff…

Fusion teaching merges several pedagogies into a coherent whole. Course management technology allows for the digitization and delivery of pedagogies in an effective and exciting manner. Online course management options more easily enable outcome assessment and monitoring for continuous improvement.

As an emerging mobile terminal, the tablet computer has begun to enter into the educational system. With the aim of having a better understanding of the application and people's perspectives on the new technology in K-12 schools in China, a survey was conducted to investigate the tablet computer's application, user's perspectives and requirements…

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets offer applications (apps) that make digital movement analysis simple and efficient in physical education. Highly sophisticated movement analysis software has been available for many years but has mainly appealed to coaches of elite athletes and biomechanists. Apps on mobile devices are less expensive…

Geometry is a major area of study in middle school mathematics, yet middle school and secondary students have difficulty learning important geometric concepts. This article considers Alexis-Claude Clairaut's approach that emphasizes engaging student curiosity about key ideas and theorems instead of directly teaching theorems before their…

When students reason during school science, they often refer to conceptions that are derived from out-of-school experiences and are poor proxies for science orthodoxy. However, for some areas of science, these conceptions represent only a proportion of students' full conceptual knowledge, for tacit understanding exists that is superior to the…

Changing an established role in a classroom is difficult. It involves constructing a new set of relations within a community. In this article we investigate how students with newly developed interest and experience in programming developed outside the classroom pick up and establish their roles as experts in programming within the classroom…

This study investigated the rate of success for IT projects using agile and standard project management methodologies. Any successful project requires use of project methodology. Specifically, large projects require formal project management methodologies or models, which establish a blueprint of processes and project planning activities. This…

In this paper, we describe a Relational Algebra Query Language (RAQL) and Relational Algebra Query (RAQ) software product we have developed that allows database instructors to teach relational algebra through programming. Instead of defining query operations using mathematical notation (the approach commonly taken in database textbooks), students…

The purpose of this article is to describe a bunch of strategies with which teachers may already be familiar and, perhaps, use regularly, but not always in the context of a formal PowerPoint[R] presentation. Here are the author's top 10 engagement techniques that fit neatly within any version of PowerPoint[R]. Some of these may also be used with…

Fermat's principle is considered as a unifying concept. It is usually presented erroneously as a "least time principle". In this paper we present some software that shows cases of maxima and minima and the application of Fermat's principle to the problem of focusing in lenses. (Contains 12 figures.)

PowerPoint[R] presentations in academia have a reputation for being less than engaging in this era of learner-centered teaching. The Net Generation also presents a formidable challenge to using PowerPoint[R]. Although the research on the basic elements is rather sparse, the multimedia elements of movement, music, and videos have a stronger…