The purpose of this single-subject case study was to document the experiences of a teacher trainee during a 12-week microteaching process in the Distance English Language Teacher Training program (DELT). The student teacher subject responded to questionnaires, submitted online dialogue journals, and answered open-ended questions before and after…

Traditional, top-down professional development (PD) can render teachers mere implementers of the ideas of others, but there is some hope that the participatory nature of social media such as Twitter might support more grassroots PD. To better understand Twitter's role in education, we conducted a survey of K-16 educators regarding their use of the…

Social media are fundamentally changing core practices in various industries. Although surveys indicate that social media are impacting social scientists, we know little about how education scholars, specifically, use social media for their work or professional learning. This article explores how educational scholars incorporated the social media,…

Microblogs, with their interactive nature, can engage students in community building and sensemaking. Using Weick's model of organizing as a framework, we integrated the use of micromessaging to increase student engagement in the large-lecture classroom. Students asked significantly more questions and asked a greater diversity of questions…

The National Literacy Trust is a national charity dedicated to raising literacy levels in the UK. Their research and analysis make them the leading authority on literacy. They run projects in the poorest communities, campaign to make literacy a priority for politicians and parents, and support schools. RM Books is a market-leading ebooks platform…

The problem investigated in this study was whether entries written to an electronic portfolio by preservice teachers improved in quality after an intervention was deployed. The study also compared portfolio metadata to writing quality scores to determine whether there was a relationship. Participants included a convenience sample of 11…

This paper describes a study investigating the use of three types of dictionaries by deaf (i.e., with severe to profound hearing loss) high school students while reading to determine the effectiveness of each type for acquiring the meanings of unknown vocabulary in text. The dictionary types used include an online bilingual multimedia English-ASL…

Reading activities in the classroom and workplace occur predominantly on paper. Since existing electronic devices do not support these reading activities as well as paper, users have difficulty taking full advantage of the affordances of electronic documents. This dissertation makes three main contributions toward supporting active reading…

For young woman, the issue of self-expression is important to consider because there are many contexts where their voices and experiences are discounted, silenced, and suppressed. Venues for self-expression can provide a way for those voices and experiences that have been ignored in classrooms and other social outlets to be recognized. This…

The expansion of the Internet has created many new opportunities for people to share their talents. Many people share just for fun--but some do it for fun and money. Online, these artists can reach a global audience. The rapid growth of online media excites many people working in the field. This article describes careers for digital media workers.…

In this article, I draw on contemporary theorizing on the concept of face (e.g., Ting-Toomey 1994, 2004; Tracy 2008) and research on Islamic and Arabic cultures and linguistic strategies (e.g., Beeman 1986; Hegland 1998; Wilce 2005; Al Zidjaly 2006) to explore the role that the Internet plays in enabling Muslim Arabs to manage or save their…

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a…

Energized by his fellow adjunct professors who had gathered for a national meeting last month in Washington, District of Columbia, Joshua A. Boldt flew home to Athens, Georgia, opened his laptop, and created a Google document. On his personal blog, the writing instructor implored colleagues to contribute to the publicly editable spreadsheet,…

Libraries are all about collecting data. When it comes to collection development and assessment of e-resources, collecting data on usage of resources aids in decision making regarding these resources and provides data-rich evidence to support the value for the user of these resources. However, the author asserts that libraries should take some…

Amid the sea change that libraries and information centers currently face, people are starting to see compelling solutions and bold initiatives from their colleagues. The challenge now becomes how to "spread the gospel"--how to inform widely dispersed information professionals about the successes they record. In 2011, volunteers within the Special…