This article describes how a K-12 school in South Florida adopted a course management system with e-portfolio capabilities. E-portfolios are available tools, though more costly, in higher-end course management systems and are gaining recognition in the K-12 market. However, according to a recent survey administered by the technology team at the…

Literacy is important not only to school success but is fundamental to skills needed to succeed in our rapidly changing technology-driven society. This article focuses on characteristics, interactions, and attitudes of parents and children related to their use of assistive technologies to build literacy skills. Interviews and observations…

We have entered a new millennium. As educators we are charged with using the phenomenal technology available to us to its greatest advantage. Modern technology cannot and must not be seen as an end but as a means to an end. Departments are being charged with offering more and more courses online as the demand for this type of education becomes an…

Despite large investments by higher education institutions in technology for faculty and student use, instructional technology is not being integrated into instruction in higher education institutions including medical education institutions. While the diffusion of instructional technologies has reached a saturation point among early adopters of…

Some of our most challenging youth are educated in interim, short-, and long-term alternative school settings. Many of those youth have emotional disturbances and learning disabilities and have experienced academic and social failure in other school settings. Federal mandates require teachers to provide mathematics instruction to those students…

This fourth edition of the New Media Consortium's (NMC) annual "Horizon Report" describes the continuing work of the Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education. Drawing on ongoing…

"Education Matters" is the monthly newsletter of the Association of American Educators (AAE), an organization dedicated to advancing the American teaching profession through personal growth, professional development, teacher advocacy and protection. This issue of the newsletter includes: (1) Making a Game of Math: AAE Affiliate Motivates…

As digital portfolios become more prevalent in teacher education, the purposes and processes for creating them have become contested. Originally meant to be critical and reflective spaces for learning about multimedia and conceived as contributing to professional growth, research shows that digital portfolios are now increasingly being used to…

Technology utilization in the schools of North Carolina was the focus of a research collaboration between the Rural Economic Development Center and the Public School Forum of North Carolina. The study was broke in to two phases. The first was to design and send out an instrument to assess how much technology is utilized in North Carolina schools,…

The term "mainstreaming" is often used to capture distance education's re-positioning within traditional universities. However, the results of a study of written distance education policies in four land grant universities challenge the implied widespread acceptance and integration of distance education into the educational mainstream.…

The authors begin their discussion with the Tanner and Tanner (1995) model of "Curricular Sources and Influences" to explain the development of the K-12 school curriculum. The model shows the school curriculum in the center of a circle. Around the circumference of the circle are political influences, social influences, economic…

The external politics of technology utilization in schools involving local, state, and federal levels of government is the central focus of this paper. Interest group politics are also examined, especially as practiced at the state level by professional associations representing teachers, administrators, and school board members. The first chapter…

The importance of accessibility to digital resources is now widely acknowledged. The W3C WAI has played a significant role in promoting the importance of accessibility and developing a framework for accessible Web resources. The accessibility of e-learning provides additional challenges that may not be faced when providing access to other Web…

Distance education fosters new kinds of collaboration--some intended, others unintended--among students and between students and instructors in college classes. The authors report the incidental learning activity within a complex of asynchronous online and compressed desktop video courses at a mid-sized university. Learning to use technology and…

Current means of determining the level of state education funding have denied millions of the nation's children access to a quality education by not providing schools with the resources they need to properly educate all children. It has also created and perpetuated wide gaps in education funding between wealthy and poor school districts. The…