Virtual worlds enable students to learn through seeing, knowing, and doing within visually rich and mentally engaging spaces. Rather than reading about events, students become part of the events through the adoption of a pre-set persona. Along with visual feedback that guides the players' activities and the development of visual skills, visual…

John Long, technology program specialist at Florida's Palm Beach County School District, has put up impressive numbers over the years. He provides training and support for the district's 104 elementary schools. Long has also presented at 20 conferences and helped launch a district technology conference that today attracts 2,000 participants--a…

Cross-age tutoring, in which older and younger students work together to improve their ELA skills, is not a new concept; Linda D. Labbo and William H. Teale explored it as a tool for poor readers as early as 1990. The author has found that using tutoring with video games also works well. Students have the opportunity to read aloud collaboratively…

Through television, many different images of ethnic, cultural, and ability groups are presented. Different people perceive these images in different ways. These perceptions affect how people value themselves and judge and interact with others. This article first summaries research on TV images and people's meaning and reaction to them. Second, it…

Artifact knowledge requires integration of information from different areas of human commonsense knowledge--our everyday understanding of object mechanics and our everyday psychology. Here, we address the question of artifact conceptual structure, outlining evidence from tasks involving categorization, function judgments, and problem solving.

As communication technologies change, so do libraries. Library instruction programs are now focused on teaching information literacy, a term that may just as well be referred to as information "literacies." The new media age involves information in a wide variety of mediums. Educators everywhere are realizing media's power to communicate and…

This interdisciplinary analysis examines the use of visual images in the college classroom. The three authors--a community psychologist, a literacy specialist, and a mathematician--share examples and critical reflections that illuminate the strengths and challenges in using this medium to meet teaching and learning goals. The authors highlight one…

The technological advance that has dominated various aspects of our daily life has led to the emergence of new literacies. This created a need for reconceptualizing the old notion of literacy which was restricted to the ability of reading and writing. It has been stated forward by many scholars that we now require a richer and more diversified…

This article examines assessment of students' visual literacy. In the context of current theory of multimodal texts, the author presents key features for visual literacy assessment and how this assessment might be undertaken. The article then proposes a set of principles and a framework for developing assessment tasks in authentic classroom…

This qualitative case study of the ReadDeVry reading circles program, a DeVry University funded project, identifies the theoretical and practical considerations for reading circles programs serving college students. As designed, the program addresses a number of the issues raised recently by national organizations such as the American College…

This article explores the emergence of multimodality as intrinsic to the learning, teaching and assessment of English in the Twenty-First Century. With subject traditions tied to the study of language, literature and media, multimodal texts and new technologies are now accorded overdue recognition in English curriculum documents in several…

This paper discussed a study involving two groups of teacher candidates' implementations of a visual literacy curriculum in their preclinical field experience. The purpose was to explore whether the curriculum provided a viable way for them to implement Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in teaching their diverse learners, including students with…

This paper presents a blended learning model in which the online component is not used to replace some of the traditional on-campus activities of a course but to "introduce new teaching objectives" that would not have been possible to achieve, because of class time limitations and the nature of the course. The instructional model was aimed at…

Less attention has been paid to teachers' relationship to contemporary visual culture, and specifically about their own visual culture. In this paper, the author would like to focus on how they relate to these global visual discourses, in order to discuss their participation in the production of visual imaginaries. She will confront the argument…