This article features Calgary Girls' School (CGS), a charter school including grades four through nine that opened with 188 students in 2003. The school was aligned with Alberta Education's charter-school mandate at that time to offer parents a broad range of school choices. Today the Alberta charter school mandate is to focus on innovation and…

This article looks at new information and communication technologies (ICTs) as sites of public pedagogy in that they produce particular forms of knowledge and literacies and reproduce representations that are always mediated through specific social relations. Public pedagogy as a process that constitutes a broader category beyond classroom…

Students today live in technology-rich environments that shape their interactions with information and with each other. Children in the 21st century have access to a wide range of technology resources and tools for learning in real-life contexts. This study reports on a survey of 4000 North Carolina middle school students about what they need to…

This article discusses in its first part three common misconceptions related to the operation of distance education providers in the digital age: The tendency to relate to e-learning as the new generation of distance education; the confusion between ends and means of distance education; and the absence of the teachers' crucial role in the…

The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA; 2000) requires an Internet filtering and public awareness strategy to protect children under 17 from harmful visual Internet depictions. This study compared high school students who went online with the CIPA restriction and college students who went online without the restriction in order to…

This paper explores how girls take up, disrupt, and disavow interest in ICTs in their lives. It examines questions of access and of social risk in relation to computers in the home and how these are nuanced by gender. The paper draws on samples of text from advertisements, government websites and focus group interviews with high-school girls in…

North Carolina State University may never build another computer lab. Instead the university has installed racks of equipment in windowless rooms where students and professors never go. This article describes a project called the Virtual Computing Lab. Users enter it remotely from their own computers in dormitory rooms or libraries. They get all…

Funding from grants is often at the core of a successful technology plan, but writing proposals requires a bit of magic and a lot of time. Grants can be a good way for educators to collaborate on building strong programs, but some creative thinking is also required. In this article, the author provides tips on how to win a grant: (1) Find a…

Each weekday when school let out, the Queens Library at Far Rockaway--a branch of the Queens Library in New York City--would fill with nearly 100 teens. Drawn by the public-use computers, many others, who had dropped out of school, would also crowd in. To invoke a cliche, the situation was both an opportunity and a challenge. The popularity of the…

Since 1980, Dr. Linda Hayden has been able to bring innovation to Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) by seeking out and partnering with entities like the U.S. Navy and NASA. For years, these partnerships allowed faculty, students, and administrators in the computer science department and other departments to gain early exposure to cutting-edge…

The way people write and communicate has changed both inside and outside the university, and because of this writing instructors are professionally responsible for addressing these changes in the classroom. Technologies have affected writing for thousands of years. From the invention of the printing press to the Internet, challenges to writing…

The purpose of this study was to assess perceptions of teachers in a rural school district in western Virginia and how their perceptions relate to technology integration. The following research questions were sought: (1)What are teachers' perceptions of technology integration? (2) What are teachers' perceptions of the role and value of technology…

As blogs light up with lively conversations about iPads, netbooks, and smart phones, it's easy to forget one major roadblock to preparing all children for the future: the digital divide. Although middle-class students often take high-speed Internet access for granted, a full 65 percent of Americans who make less than $25,000 a year lack broadband…

This study evaluates how well information and communication technology (ICT) related needs of students with various disabilities are met at school, at home, and in e-learning contexts. Results are based on the POSITIVES Scale, a 26 item objective measure of how well the ICT related needs of these students are met. The sample consists of 131…

This paper will address how the digital divide affects distance education. Lack of access for some students does raise concerns. Access to technology is often defined by what students don't have: what is called a digital divide. Access also is defined by the speed of Internet connections. Access in the future will be even greater as more computers…