The role of technology in education is ever increasing. This article looks at students with disabilities and the problem of writing independently. Speech recognition technology offers an option, or solution, for students who have physical and/or learning disabilities and for students who cannot access and use computer keyboards or switches.…

Standard least squares analysis of variance methods suffer from poor power under arbitrarily small departures from normality and fail to control the probability of a Type I error when standard assumptions are violated. This article describes a framework for robust estimation and testing that uses trimmed means with an approximate degrees of…

This article describes a study that investigates learner responses to three distinct types of corrective feedback for misspellings produced by English learners of German. Twenty-eight beginner and intermediate students used an online parser-based system for German that recorded student interaction with the software over 15 weeks. The study…

The efficiency of teaching algorithms can be highly improved by utilizing the senses as educational aids. The authors have developed a new didactical method and a software tool which exemplifies, for the case of simple algorithms, how the involvement of eyesight, hearing and the kinaesthesia can help in the teaching and learning process. This…

In this paper we present eTeacher, an intelligent agent that provides personalized assistance to e-learning students. eTeacher observes a student's behavior while he/she is taking online courses and automatically builds the student's profile. This profile comprises the student's learning style and information about the student's performance, such…

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a new technology that is currently being extolled by many industry experts and software vendors. Potentially it represents a platform independent language for sharing information over networks in a way that is much more seamless than with previous technologies. It is extensible in that XML serves as a "meta"…

An Excel add-in--XSEOS--that implements several excess Gibbs free energy models and equations of state has been developed for educational use. Several traditional and modern thermodynamic models are available in the package with a user-friendly interface. XSEOS has open code, is freely available, and should be useful for instructors and students…

The [Co(4-pyrimidinolate)[subscript 2](H[subscript 2]O)[subscript n]] species, which can be easily and selectively prepared by simple addition of aqueous solutions of the 4-pyrimidinolate organic ligand to Co(II) acetate (or nitrate) aqueous solutions (n = 4, 6) or by controlled heating of the hydrated phases (n = 0), proved to be versatile…

This article presents a list of this year's best practices from America's classrooms. This list was compiled by the staff of the Tech&Learning magazine. These best practices include: (1) video programs produced by the Horry County in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; (2) a gaming design course introduced at Phoebus High School, Hampton City Schools,…

We appropriate Rogoff's ("Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context," 1991; in: Wertsch et al. (eds.) "Sociocultural studies of mind," 1993) notion of guided participation to demonstrate, through abbreviated case studies, our strategy for integrating mobile technology-based learning experiences in higher education. Guided…

While most high school juniors in Howard County, Maryland, were quietly studying in their classrooms, students enrolled in the Energy, Power and Transportation Academy (EPT) of the Applications and Research Lab (ARL), in Ellicott City, were making a lot of noise, welding and cutting away to build an all-terrain wheelchair. The author was a part of…

College student notes were analysed with respect to the amount of words copied directly, omitted and added to the teacher's overheads or PowerPoint slides in order to understand the effect of teacher scaffolds on student generative learning during initial encoding. Scores on quizzes taken at the end of classes from which notes were collected were…

Cross-faculty and cross-disciplinary collaborations within higher education are rare, no doubt largely due to the location of academics within discipline- and faculty-based structures. When collaborations do occur, they are frequently problematic, even when the collaborators stem from closely related disciplines. However, collaborations are…

Not that many years back, portals were nothing more than splash pages from which users could click on links to navigate a school's web-based resources. Today, however, they are much more: single sign-on gateways that easily enable users to do everything from pay tuition and view transcripts, to purchase parking permits, and sell used books. Still,…

In this article, the author provides technology-based techniques for prewriting invention and drafting that offer students new ways to look at and think about writing topics and tasks. Rather than creating electronic versions of existing paper-and-pencil invention strategies, the author suggests strategies using commonly owned and used computer…