Teens are impatient and unsophisticated online researchers who are often limited by their poor reading skills. Because they are attracted to clean and simple Web interfaces, they often turn to Google--and now Wikipedia--to help meet their research needs. The Google Game, co-authored by this author, teaches kids that there is a well-thought-out…

Marie Evans Schmidt and Elizabeth Vandewater review research on links between various types of electronic media and the cognitive skills of school-aged children and adolescents. One central finding of studies to date, they say, is that the content delivered by electronic media is far more influential than the media themselves. Most studies, they…

Amy Jordan addresses the need to balance the media industry's potentially important contributions to the healthy development of America's children against the consequences of excessive and age-inappropriate media exposure. Much of the philosophical tension regarding how much say the government should have about media content and delivery stems…

Technology-dependent teaching strategies can exploit the currently underused capacities of media-rich Web 2.0 technology to enable student engagement and support higher order thinking. In particular, Web 2.0 technologies support learners' opportunities to coconstruct ideas/knowledge and ways in which they can add their own interpretations in to…

Background: Teaching Games for Understanding has been promoted as an innovative curriculum model in the past decade in Hong Kong. It focuses on developing pupils' tactical awareness and decision making capability through integrating the cognitive and contextual dimensions of learning in physical education. Aims: This article reports a qualitative…

Recognizing the pedagogical value of gaming, academics along with game designers and educational content developers have begun producing resources to improve educational game design and make instructional games more accessible to teachers wanting to incorporate them into their classes. However, the rapid growth of such resources has made it…

Numerous policies have been proposed at the local, state, and national level to restrict youth access to violent video and computer games. Although studies are cited to support policies, there is no published research on how children perceive the uses and influence of violent interactive games. The authors conduct focus groups with 42 boys ages 12…

Two instructional approaches that have been of interest in promoting sport have been the Sport Education Model (SEM) and the Traditional Style (TS) of teaching physical education. The purpose of this study was to investigate how SEM and TS would affect skill development, knowledge, and game performance for volleyball at the secondary level. A 2 x…

Empirical evidence is needed to corroborate the intuitions of gamers and game developers in understanding the benefits of Immersive Virtual Worlds (IVWs) as a learning environment and the role that music plays within these environments. We report an investigation to determine if background music of the genre typically found in computer-based…

There is growing interest in the use of virtual gaming worlds in education, supported by the increased use of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) and massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) for collaborative learning. However, this paper argues that collaborative gaming worlds have been in use much longer and are much wider…

While digital virtual worlds have been used in education for a number of years, advances in the capabilities and spread of technology have fed a recent boom in interest in massively multi-user 3D virtual worlds for entertainment, and this in turn has led to a surge of interest in their educational applications. In this paper we briefly review the…

The paper discusses the importance of prosocial behavior from the media and its effects on children. The paper reviews several research studies on prosocial and media on children. The paper also offers implications and limitations dealings with prosocial behavior and media on children.

This study examines a collaborative project between a literacy professor and a classroom teacher. The professor used a Newbery Award winning novel to develop a unit for a fifth-grade classroom using curricular materials and methods that showcased research-based literacy practices. The fifth-grade teacher, in turn, used her knowledge of students'…

Over the last decade, the needs of educational organizations have been changing in accordance with increasingly complex pedagogical models and with the technological evolution of e-learning environments with very dynamic teaching and learning requirements. This book explores state-of-the-art software architectures and platforms used to support…

This report describes the findings of an analysis of a series of action research projects conducted by Vigo County School Corporation at Terre Haute North Vigo High School (hereinafter referred to as North Vigo). During the 2008-2009 school year, 19 teachers at North Vigo participated in independent action research studies regarding the extent to…