Few of previous reading studies "comprehensively" examined the contributing factors of students' digital reading literacy. To fill this gap, based upon the ecological perspective, this study aims to investigate which factors from the student, home, and school context are more important in discriminating high-performing digital readers…

Learner journals, diaries, and logs have been used in a variety of learning contexts, including foreign language learning. This paper investigates how diary writing can be used in the EFL classroom to encourage students to express their identities through the language they are learning; it is also a way of supporting them in their quest for…

Higher education is increasingly called upon to respond to the need for educational innovations promoting graduate employability and lifelong learning (European Higher Education Area, 2012, 2015). To achieve this, students must progressively become able to reflect both on their learning and their potential to improve and plan their own educational…

Digital technologies allow teachers and students to experience new pedagogical approaches leveraging on interactivity and collaboration. Among the available techniques, digital storytelling (DST) has been usually regarded as an activity that can both enrich the teaching practices and foster students' active behaviour. This paper aims at analysing…

The high cost of tuition and textbooks can have a negative impact on potential students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Open Educational Resources (OER) offers students a way to save educational costs while utilizing high-quality open textbooks. Up until now, there have been few studies focused on a specific provider of open textbooks. This…

In today's multicultural world, digital tools may become a powerful means to building a culture of dialogue that supports "culturally responsive" teaching within imaginative multicultural learning environments. Students can develop global competencies, learning more about others' and their own culture as part of their personal…

This pedagogical paper describes and discusses a teaching activity of intercultural education for mobile students developed within the European IEREST project (http://ierest-project.eu/). The activity "24 h Erasmus Life" aims at making students reflect on four interrelated areas of their sojourn: the emotional impact of living abroad,…

This paper reports on the first stage of an Italian national project, Access Thorough Text (ACT henceforth), designed to respond to issues related to reading strategies, textual barriers and online access to web texts in English in educational environments, with specific reference to English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The first stage of the work…

This paper describes a three-step method for the construction of codebooks meant for analyzing ePortfolio content. The first step produces a prototype based on qualitative analysis of very different ePortfolios from the same course. During the second step, the initial version of the codebook is tested on a larger sample and subsequently revised.…

Digital Storytelling (DST) is a powerful tool for teaching complex concepts. DSTs are typically used in the humanities but several papers have shown that they are also a wonderful tool for the sciences because they are more involving, contextualized and can easily lead to deeper understanding. In the classical use of DST the story is the content,…

It is inevitable that as a result of progress in technology and the changes in the ways with which design is conceived, interior architecture schools should be updated according to these requirements and that new educational processes should be tried out. It is for this reason that the scope and aim of this study have been determined as being the…

The CercleS version of the European Language Portfolio (ELP) has been used with language degree students at the University of Padova since the academic year 2002-2003. The courses into which it is embedded are generally blended: lessons take place in traditional classrooms and in the multimedia language laboratory, and students work online in…

This paper analyses the rationale for the creation of multimedia texts, in the context of learning English in an economically and socially depressed context. Issues of implementation of macro-level language policies in a local context are particularly stringent when the macro-level approach is rendered impracticable for some reason (e.g. cost,…

The authors studied a course in which an instructor allowed individuals at a distance to participate. Although these students were not formally enrolled in the university where the class took place, the instructor gave them full access to all course materials and encouraged them to complete course assignments. The authors examined the time and…

Creating archival descriptions in a digital environment and communicating across the Internet is not the same as traditional paper-based communication. As in other cultural domains, in archival description the medium influences the structure and content of information. The SIASFI Project and the Online Guide to the State Archives of Florence are…