Home Schooling Overview : Benefits of Home Schooling
Teach your children from home; learn the benefits of homeschooling in this home schooling video from an experienced teacher and education curriculum expert.
Terry Neven, founder and principal of the Sunland Christian School, is the executive director of the National Independent Study Accreditation Council. Filmmaker: Traci Holsey
Revival in housing will happen sooner than expected, says Charles Schwab's Liz Ann Sonders
The U.S. real estate market is set for a rebound in 2011 as home prices sit at their most affordable levels in many places across the country, says Market Strategist Liz Ann Sonders of Charles Schwab. But the recovery will not be even across the U.S.
Lesson #095, Friday albero = tree cassetto = drawer bosco = woods uccello = bird tetto = roof fiore = flower lago = lake campo = field corridoio = hallway vaso = vase stazione = station banca = bank ospedale = hospital ufficio = office giardino = garden parco = park cadere = to fall io cado = I fall tu cadi = you fall (informal) Lei cade = you fall (formal) lui/lei cade = he
Middle School Portal: Math and Science Pathways (MSP2)
This online activity challenges students to think about and use percentages related to television viewing to make comparisons to determine television viewing preferences. The activity is one of 80 mathematical challenges featured on the Figure This! web site emphasizing real-world uses of mathematics. To answer this activity's initial question, the student reads data from a chart, applies a formula, and uses the calculated information to draw a conclusion about TV viewing preferences. Informatio
Half-Baked Logo Microworlds as Boundary Objects in Integrated Design
The paper addresses the problem of fragmentation of the communities involved in the design of digital media for education. It draws on the experience gained at the Educational Technology Lab in the design of Logo-based microworlds with three different platforms respectively based on component computing, 3D game engines and 3D navigation with a GIS. In this paper I use the term half-baked to describe a microworld which is explicitly designed to engage its users with changing it as the main aspect
Information Technologies for Biology Education: Computerized Electrophysiology of Plant Cells
Biology has moved from a bench-based discipline to a bioinformational science in modern times but application of computational and analytical methods of informatics in it is still a problem for many researchers and students of biology. We suggest to integrate cost effective and practical combination of the real and the virtual laboratories into the undergraduate biological science curriculum. This laboratory work illustrates passive and active electrical properties of plant cell membranes while
Why Web 2.0 is Good for Learning and for Research: Principles and Prototypes
The term "Web 2.0" is used to describe applications that distinguish themselves from previous generations of software by a number of principles. Existing work shows that Web 2.0 applications can be successfully exploited for technology-enhance learning. However, in-depth analyses of the relationship between Web 2.0 technology on the one hand and teaching and learning on the other hand are still rare. In this article, we will analyze the technological principles of the Web 2.0 and describe thei
Remote Training via WEB for Operation and Maintenance of a
Rain Monitoring Equipment using PHP and G
The aim of this paper is to present the development and implementation of an interactive environment via WEB for the training of non-centralized technician teams that work with the maintenance of ambient monitoring equipment. The case presented here is concerned to the network of Pluviologgers installed in the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil. The tools used for the construction of the WEB environment and, also, the requirements are detailed. The methodology and the techniques presented in this c
Motor-Manipulatory Behaviours and Learning: an Observational Study
In this paper we investigated the role of motor-manipulatory behaviour in the learning modalities of thirty-five primary school children interacting with a Lego MindStorms kit. In particular, by means of an observational taxonomy of childrens behaviour, we analysed the video records of two observational sessions regarding the learning activities during the building of a small robot. Our results demonstrated that motormanipulatory behaviours are strictly linked to cognitive processes, and that
Learning through investigative games and internet on-line activities
Internet is an important phenomenon in our society and already become one of the mostly used media around the world. In human history this is the first media, which is broadly used in so little time. Obviously, it plays an important role also in the life of our children. They use it for communication with each other (chat, email), they use it for finding new information to school, and they search the web or even create their own websites. The investigative games on internet are competitions, thr
Reducing cognitive load and fostering cognitive skill acquisition: Benefits of category-avoiding exa
In this paper, we provide evidence against the common idea that worked examples should be designed to convey problem categories and category-specific solution procedures. Instead we propose that instructional examples should be designed in a way that supports the understanding of relations between structural problem features and individual solution steps, i.e. relations that hold below the category level. We illustrate in the domain of probability word problems how category-avoiding instructiona
Using A Simulated Student for Instructional Design
In this paper, I describe how a cognitive model was used as a simulated student to help design lessons for training circuit board assemblers. The model was built in the Soar cognitive architecture, and was initially endowed with only an ability to learn instructions and prerequisite knowledge for the task. Five lessons, and a total of 81 instructions for teaching expert assembly were developed by iteratively drafting and testing instructions with the simulated student. The resulting instructions
Teachers' attitudes to and beliefs about web-based collaborative learning environments in the contex
This paper reports the conceptions of teachers from four European countries of the
Innovative Technologies for Collaborative Learning project tools for collaborative
learning. Fifty six teachers were interviewed about different aspects of the CLE (Webbased
Collaborative Learning Environment) implementations and about their own
evaluations of the CLE implementations in their classrooms. Their answers were analysed using categories based on a model from cultural-historical activity theory
(Engestr
Meanings for Fraction as Number - Measure by Exploring the Number Line
Construction of meanings for fraction as number-measure is studied during the implementation of exploratory tasks concerning comparison and ordering of fractions as well as operations with fractions. 12-year-old students were working collaboratively in groups of two with software that combines graphical and symbolic notation of fractions represented as points on the number line. Fractions as points and segments, ordering fractions as part of kinesthetic activities and abstracting the scaling of
Adaptive and context-aware scenarios for technology-enhanced learning system based on a didactical t
Among the main issues of future technology-enhanced learning systems, we can mention the following ones: the ability to reuse learning resources (learning objects, tools and services) from large repositories, to take into account the context and to allow dynamic adaptation to different learners based on substantial advances in pedagogical theories and knowledge models. In our framework, the goal of scenarios is to describe the learning and tutoring activities to acquire some knowledge domain (fo
Combining Knowledge Awareness and Information Filtering in an Open-ended Collaborative Learning Envi
Knowledge awareness (KA) has been proposed to increase collaboration opportunities in an open ended and collaborative learning environment. To encourage collaboration, an individual userâs agent called KA-Agent autonomously informs the learner about up-to-the-minute activities from other learners. For instance, a message might be ãsomeone is looking at the same knowledge that you are looking at.ä Although this message, called active KA, is very useful to create real-time collaboration, a larg
The ZAP Project: Designing interactive computer tools for learning psychology
In the ZAP project, a set of interactive computer programs called 'ZAPs' was developed. The programs were designed in such a way that first-year students experience psychological phenomena in a vivid and self-explanatory way. Students can either take the role of participant in a psychological experiment, they can experience phenomena themselves, or they can take the role of researcher and learn by discovery. ZAPs provide added value to existing learning materials about psychological topics and c
Effects of pictures, age and experience on learning to use a computer program
This study examines the effects of pictures of screen captures and input devices on documentation for older novices. There was no main effect of pictures, but there were statistically significant interactions between the type of picture and the factors of age and computer experience. As predicted, the most optimized designsthe ones presenting screen capturesmoderated the negative effects of age. We argue that screen captures help reduce two problems in the cognitive area that are especially
Six Years of Knowledge Networking in Learning Sciences and Technologies
This report presents a series of in-depth reflections about the work of the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) from 1997 until 2004. Each member of the CILT team (Principal investigator, postdoctoral scholar, project coordinator and manager) provided their personal reflections on what they, and all of us as a group, have learned from the attempt to stimulate the development and implementation of important, technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 STEM learning in
