The paper reports on a Department of Culture, Museums and Sport (DCMS) funded project which provided modest amounts of time for teachers to be freed from their classroom teaching to explore the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in their subject teaching, and to meet up together to discuss their use of new technology. The…

Computer and video gaming are often considered to be potential routes to the development of aptitude and interest in using other forms of information technology (IT). The purpose of this exploratory study was to determine the extent to which young people who play games engage in related IT practices, such as creating and sharing content or…

This paper introduces Gridcole, a new system that can be easily tailored by educators in order to support the realization of scripted collaborative learning situations. To do so, educators can provide a script specifying the sequence of activities to be performed by learners as well as the tools and documents required to support them. Gridcole can…

Two experimental studies test the effect of group mirrors upon quantitative and qualitative aspects of participation in collaborative problem solving. Mirroring tools consist of a graphical representation of the group's actions which is dynamically updated and displayed to the collaborators. In addition, metacognitive tools display a standard for…

Despite the assumption that the integration of ICT influences the entire school system, research focusing on ICT in schools is generally limited to the study of variables at class level. In contrast to these studies, the present research explores ICT integration from a school improvement approach. More particularly, it examines the local school…

This study reports the impact of high sensitivity to early exchange in 11th-grade, CSCL triads solving well- and ill-structured problems in Newtonian Kinematics. A mixed-method analysis of the evolution of participation inequity (PI) in group discussions suggested that participation levels tended to get locked-in relatively early on in the…

The Internet and Web technology development have opened up new ways for people to communicate, gain new information and increase their knowledge. One particular area of interest is that of using online resources to empower informal learners to increase their knowledge at their own time and space. One could look at an online resource as a public…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate students' attitudes towards the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a reading skills course offered at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. To this end, 30 first year students of the foreign language education (FLE) department followed a four-week component of an…

Simulation-based educational products are excellent set of illustrative tools that proffer features like visualization of the dynamic behavior of a real system, etc. Such products have great efficacy in education and are known to be one of the first-rate student centered learning methodologies. These products allow students to practice skills such…

This paper presents learners' task results gathered by means of an example task-oriented environment for knowledge testing and processed by EXCEL. The processing is domain- and task-independent and includes automatic calculation of several important task and session's parameters, drawing specific graphics, generating tables, and analyzing the…

We investigated the effects of a highly rated commercial electronic book (e-book) for young children on kindergarteners' emergent literacy skills within the context of paired peer versus individual use of the e-book. The sample of 110 kindergarteners had a mean age of 5.64 years and approximately equal numbers of boys and girls, randomly chosen…

Learning in complex and ill-structured knowledge domains requires accommodation of multiple perspectives embedded in authentic activities and the reconciliation of those perspectives with personal beliefs resulting in conceptual change. Cognitive flexibility hypertext systems support that process by enabling learners to explore authentic cases…

This paper summarises the outcomes of research that recorded and interpreted change in pre-service teachers' pedagogical beliefs when immersed in unique synchronous networked collaboration. The pre-service teachers were involved in the design and implementation of synchronous networked tasks, supported by the theoretical and pragmatic application…

In this study, the effect of computer-assisted instruction on conceptual understanding of chemical bonding and attitude toward chemistry was investigated. The study employed a quasi-experimental design involving 11 grade students; 25 in an experimental and 25 in a control group. The Chemical Bonding Achievement Test (CBAT) consisting of 15…

In this paper we compared the efficacy of face-to-face and computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) in increasing academic knowledge and professional competences. We also explored how students' personality characteristics and learning strategies and teachers' characteristics were associated with better learning outcomes in online or…