The end of the year is almost here--? keep your students entertained with these dynamite software programs Whether you're creating a scrapbook as a culminating activity to the school year or gathering your pictures from this year for a memory-filled cd to send home with students, the author's selection for this month?s Editor?s Choice is a perfect…

Several quantitative studies have sought to determine the factors affecting the unauthorized copying of software, particularly in North America. However, we find no statistically reliable studies on the situation in Europe. In order to address this gap in the literature, we explored the attitudes to and factors affecting the unauthorized copying…

New Internet tools and applications are emerging all the time. Some are truly new; others are Internet versions of older technologies, or new versions of older Internet technologies. This article discusses some new Internet applications that appear to have implications for education and particularly for school libraries. These Internet…

To any library with an electronic collection of any significance, the OpenURL link resolver has (or should) become an indispensable service for helping its users retrieve full text from citations. Although they are a relatively new technology (in library terms, at any rate), link resolvers arguably have become as important as the OPAC; they locate…

Multimedia is a mixture of text, audio, video, graphics, and images. Research studies have shown that higher levels of learning occur when students are presented information via multimedia rather than a single medium. The actual mechanics of inserting multimedia components into a file varies from application to application. For example, to insert…

The Moodle course management system is an open source system that educators can use to create online courses. Begun in 1999, the Moodle community has now grown so that by early June 2005 there were about 3,500 Moodle sites in more than 100 countries (and that counts only registered users). To use Moodle, one first needs to install it on a Web…

The goal of this paper is to provide a tutorial introduction to the topic of edge detection of the tongue from ultrasound scans for researchers in speech science and phonetics. The method introduced here is Active Contours (also called snakes), a method for searching for an edge, assuming that it is a smooth curve in the image data. The advantage…

An Excel file that performs self-consistent field (SCF) calculations for the two-electron atoms is described. It is readily constructed and is relatively simple to use, providing a visual demonstration of how the self-consistent field (SCF) procedure is applied and what issues are involved.

As China enters WTO, more college graduates with higher oral English proficiency are required. However, we learned that even students in some distinguished universities are lack of this ability. Based on her teaching experiences and the theory proposed by Krashen and some other well-know foreign languages teaching researchers, the author of this…

Federal educational policy, "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001", focused attention on America's education with conspicuous results. One aspect, "highly qualified classroom teacher" and "principal" (HQ), was taxing since states established individual accountability structures. The HQ impact and use of data-informed…

High school distance learning is becoming more prevalent; however, little is known about students' perceptions of such courses making improvements difficult. Drawing from the theoretical framework of constructivism, the purpose of the concurrent, mixed method, descriptive study was to identify students' perceptions of Alabama's distance learning…

The technological development and cultural acceptance of e-books today parallels the state of the printed book in the 15th century. E-books are increasingly available from a variety of distributors and retailers, and work on a myriad of devices, but the majority remain simply digitized versions of print books. Some devices or platforms include…

The current investigation studied the effects of a computer software program of the oral reading fluency and comprehension of eight, first grade students. These students were identified as being either "at-risk" or "some-risk" for reading failure on the DIBELS oral reading fluency winter benchmark assessment. A multiple probe…

This study was designed to evaluate the effects of the proprietary science education software, "Conversionoes," on students' conceptual and visual understanding of dimensional analysis. The participants in the study were high school general chemistry students enrolled in two public high schools with different demographics (School A and…

A postal survey of high school astronomy teachers strongly confirms many results of an earlier electronic survey. Additional and new results include a measure of the level of inquiry (more structured inquiry and teacher-led) in the classroom as well as data showing that more emphasis is given to traditional topics than to contemporary astronomy…