Despite the abundance of karst terrains and a universal lack of knowledge about the role they play in supplying freshwater resources, informal environmental education through guided show cave tours is poorly understood. This study evaluated techniques for educating cave guides on how to disseminate information about human-karst interactions to…

Professional development is vital to help teachers gain skills and knowledge to teach about current environmental and societal issues. For climate change education, educators may need information paired with content-specific teaching strategies in order to build confidence to incorporate the topic into their curriculum. We applied educative…

Federal laws require teachers to understand the special needs of their students and provide the best possible education for them. However, many teachers have completed their preservice education without the requisite skills to implement assistive technology to support exceptional students. These teachers have become dependent upon professional…

Functional analysis (FA) is an assessment procedure involving the systematic manipulation of an individual's environment to determine why a target behavior is occurring. An analog FA provides practitioners the opportunity to manipulate variables in a controlled environment and formulate a hypothesis for the function of a behavior. In previous…

A modified J. Seed, Council of Beings is used to ascertain participants' understanding of their sense of place within the environment. Over the past 15 years, students in environmental education, teachers in-service programs or undergraduate face-to-face and Internet sustainability education courses have been exposed to pedagogy that leads to the…

Teachers' problem-based learning knowledge, abilities, and attitudes are important factors in successful K--12 PBL implementations. This article describes the development and use of a free, online module entitled "Design a Problem-Based Learning Experience." The module production, aligned with theories of andragogy, was a partnership…

Enhancing all students' academic performance continues to be a national priority, and although achievement gains have been made overtime, shortfalls in mathematics learning for students with disabilities (SWD) remain. Research reveals that a substantial portion of the variability in students' mathematics achievement gains is due to the teacher. To…

Florida Senate Bill 1108, requires educators applying for re-certification to earn one college credit or the equivalent in-service points in teaching students with disabilities (SWD). To assist educators in fulfilling this requirement, a college of education designed an online course and an educator's summer institute (ESI). This article examines…

The University of Florida Cooperative Extension conducted a statewide program with a dual role during 2013 and 2014 to enhance efficiency. The program provided in-service training to county Extension agents and provided continuing education to meet requirements needed by licensed pesticide applicators. Using Polycom distance technology, the event…

School-based tobacco prevention programs have been proven effective in reducing tobacco use. This evaluation aimed to assess the impact of an online tobacco prevention teacher training program on teachers and their students in Florida schools. A total of 344 teachers, including 72 K-3 grade teachers, 44 4th-5th grade teachers, and 228 6th-12th…

The Community of Inquiry model provides a framework for recognizing and evaluating interpersonal behaviors in online educational settings. One of its three components, teaching presence, describes behaviors that are under the auspices of the online instructor. By examining behaviors through the theoretical lens provided by teaching presence, and…

The 2010 "Deepwater Horizon" oil spill greatly affected the Gulf Coast, and the news media reported information to wide audiences. Students enrolled in an online Environmental Geoscience course in fall 2010 voluntarily participated in a Gulf oil spill survey. More than 92% of the students (N = 77; 83 total enrollment), who were primarily…

This report focuses on the role of universities in teacher education centers in the state of Florida as well as on some of the issues and impacts related to that role. Research makes it clear that universities, almost entirely through colleges of education, have contributed substantially to the improvement of inservice education. Several factors…

This document discusses concepts of a teacher education center and states that teacher education center programs include the following: (a) career-long teacher education, (b) cooperation and collaboration, (c) commitment to shared power, (d) pooling of resources, (e) field-based preservice teacher education, and (f) broader focus on in-service…

The issue of school achievement among k-12 English language learners (ELLs) has grown in recent years to become one that policy makers and school officials can hardly afford to ignore. A range of indicators including graduation rates, and Florida's High stakes test the FCAT, attests to this general trend. English language learners in Florida are…