In this paper, we propose a social semiotic approach to studying PowerPoint in university classrooms. Our approach is centred on two premises: (1) PowerPoint is a semiotic technology that can be integrated into the pedagogical discourse of classrooms, and (2) PowerPoint technology encompasses three interrelated dimensions of social semiotic…

A promising "underlying bivariate normal" approach was proposed by Jöreskog and Moustaki for use in the factor analysis of ordinal data. This was a limited information approach that involved the maximization of a composite likelihood function. Its advantage over full-information maximum likelihood was that very much less computation was…

A long-term observation of students' usage of a dynamic geometry in a classroom at all grade levels has challenged to develop an approach for learning and understanding mathematics in an easier way for both students and teachers. The paper deals with the results of a study that investigates the process and outcomes of the implementation of…

This paper deals with ideas about dynamic presentation of photo-pictures by means of dynamic software GeoGebra in order to motivate art students to get acquainted with some specific mathematical functions. The results of the experiment include deeper understanding of the functions' nature, search of new functions for dealing with a practical…

In this article, Michael F. Shaughnessy, Contributing Editor of this journal, interviews David Dockterman, Chief Architect, Learning Sciences, at Scholastic Education, where he provides guidance on turning research into practical programs. Dockterman was one of the founders of Tom Snyder Productions, a leading educational software developer and…

As tablet technologies continue to evolve, the emergence of educational applications (apps) is impacting the work of teacher educators. Beyond online lists of best apps for education and recommendations from colleagues, teacher educators have few resources available to support their teaching of how to select educational apps. In response, this…

This study explored the components of Maryland's newly-implemented teacher evaluation framework and compared state requirements with evaluations to three local school systems' evaluation procedures. The study sought to investigate the relationship between three evaluation protocols in comparison to the state requirements. Three local school…

Recommender Systems (RS) have been applied in the Technology enhanced Learning (TeL) field for facilitating, among others, Learning Object (LO) selection and retrieval. Most of the existing approaches, however, aim at accommodating the needs of learners and teacher-oriented RS are still an under-investigated field. Moreover, the systems that focus…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the key considerations of community, scalability, supportability, security, and functionality for selecting open-source software in California universities as perceived by technology leaders. Methods: After a review of the cogent literature, the key conceptual framework categories were identified…

Conversations about what constitutes "developmentally appropriate" use of technology in early childhood education have, to date, focused largely on a single, blunt measure--screen time--that fails to capture important nuances, such as what type of media a child is accessing and whether technology use is taking place solo or with peers.…

This paper features an expanded Web-based "Facilities Performance Indicators (FPI) Report." The purpose of APPA's Facilities Performance Indicators is to provide a representative set of statistics about facilities in educational institutions. "The Facilities Performance Indicators Report" is designed for survey…

Although Rasch models have been shown to be a sound methodological approach to develop and validate measures of psychological constructs for more than 50 years, they remain underutilized in psychology and other social sciences. Until recently, one reason for this underutilization was the lack of syntactically simple procedures to fit Rasch and…

This study employed a qualitative research design to investigate how instructional designers use evaluation in everyday design practice. While past research has examined how designers spend their time, how they generally make decisions, and expert-novice differences, little attention has been paid to use of context, input, process, or product…

At the end of the 2010-2011 school year, San Diego Unified School District, had 10,000 iPads in use and was set to add 18,000 more the next semester. Teachers and students were enthusiastic about using the devices yet the district faced a serious problem: Teachers were reporting to the instructional tech team that using Apple Configurator and…

The NCTM Algebra Standard suggests that students use technology to explore the effects of varying the parameters in y = ax2 + bx + c. This article discusses an extension of this task that incorporates dynamic geometry software to engage students in generating, testing, and proving mathematical conjectures.