Background: The purpose of this study was to examine how skilled adolescent readers draw on their prior knowledge of multimodality and narrative text structure when navigating an intentionally designed digital narrative text. We know that skilled middle-school readers have been taught narrative text structure and that adolescents who use the…

1:1 Laptop initiatives continue to grow throughout Nebraska schools. There are many questions regarding their effectiveness in improving student learning, justifications for expenses, and the process to guide such an initiative. The purpose of this case study was to explore students' perceptions of academic self-efficacy and self-regulation while…

The increasing gap between students at-home and in-school use of the Internet has been widely documented by researchers across many disciplines. After reviewing literature suggesting (1) students' online practices outside of school are significantly social, meaningful, and markedly different than opportunities afforded in school, and (2) research…

This report draws on 53 focus group interviews conducted with students aged 13 and 15 in both representative and innovating UK secondary schools. The schedule for these discussions covered a wide range of issues relating to the use of Web 2.0 services both in and out of school. These young people were often deeply engaged with this technology and…

Throughout the world, today's students are being characterized as digital natives, the "net generation." This twenty-first-century student cohort is adept at multi-tasking and at using a variety of tools and resources including electronic search engines, blogs, wikis, visual images, videos, gaming platforms, and social networking.…

Middle grades teachers should create meaningful learning activities involving stimulating literature and interesting composition prompts. This article describes a unit in which eighth graders read short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Using multiple learning and teaching approaches, they expanded their vocabularies, responded artistically to "The…

The easy availability of both web-based communication tools and classroom internet access presents teachers with myriad ways to engage their students in projects with kids all over the globe. Two teachers--English teacher Hagit Goldstein in Israel and Spanish teacher Allison Baugher in the US--were connecting students through an online classroom…

Today's adolescent student is thriving in a world where information and communication technology (ICT) encourages literate practices. These practices, described and theorized by studies of the new literacies, are not encouraged or supported in most school settings where traditional notions of literacy still dominate. Students in grades 6-8 at a…

For the thirty-seventh year, the Research and Theory Division and the Division of Instructional Design of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) sponsored the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Jacksonville, Florida. This year's Proceedings…

As digital portfolios become more prevalent in teacher education, the purposes and processes for creating them have become contested. Originally meant to be critical and reflective spaces for learning about multimedia and conceived as contributing to professional growth, research shows that digital portfolios are now increasingly being used to…