Despite the fact that teaching is increasingly referred to as a design science, teacher education programs devote relatively little time to developing expertise in the design of instruction, beyond lesson planning. Yet today's teachers not only plan lessons that incorporate existing classroom activities and instructional resources, they also…

Teachers' involvement in curriculum design is essential for sustaining the relevance of technology-enhanced learning materials. Customizing--making small adjustments to tailor given materials to particular situations and settings--is one design activity in which busy teachers can feasibly engage. Research indicates that customizations based…

Teachers are not typically involved as participatory designers in the design of technology-enhanced learning environments. As they have unique and valuable perspectives on the role of technology in education, it is of utmost importance to engage them in a participatory design process. Adopting a case study methodology, we aim to reveal in what…

Teachers often find themselves in a position in which they need to adapt technology-enhanced materials to meet the needs of their students. As new technologies--especially those not specifically designed for learning--find their way into schools, teachers need to be able to design learning experiences that use these new technologies in their local…

While the benefits of teacher involvement in designing technology enhanced learning are acknowledged in the literature, far less is known about shaping that involvement to yield those benefits. Research is needed to understand how teachers learn through design; how teacher design activities may be supported; and how teacher involvement in design…

This paper presents a small group computing environment in which four students each control a different point in a geometric space, such that as a group they collectively manipulate the vertices of a quadrilateral. Prior research has revealed that students have considerable difficulty in learning about the interrelationships among quadrilaterals…

During the past two decades a variety of approaches to support argumentation learning in computer-based learning environments have been investigated. We present an approach that combines argumentation diagramming and collaboration scripts, two methods successfully used in the past individually. The rationale for combining the methods is to…

There is a general consensus among researchers and teacher educators that classroom video can be a valuable tool for pre-service teacher education. Media such as video are not, however, in themselves effective. They have to be embedded in an instructional program to be useful. Yet, little empirical research examines how specific instructional…

While a great deal of research has studied the messages students contribute to electronic discussion forums, productive participation in online learning conversations requires more than just making posts. One important pre-condition for productive interactivity and knowledge construction is engagement with the posts contributed by others. In this…

The main objective of this paper is to examine the use of audio- versus text-based asynchronous online discussions. We report two case studies conducted within the context of semester-long teacher education courses at an Asian Pacific university. Forty-one graduate students participated in Study I. After the online discussions (both audio-based as…

This paper reports findings from a phenomenographic investigation into blended university teaching using virtual learning environments (VLEs). Interviews with 25 Computer Science teachers in Greek universities illuminated a spectrum of teachers' conceptions and approaches from "teacher-focused and content-oriented", through "student-focused and…

Computer-based surgical training simulators are instrumental in skill-based training and performance measurement. However, to date, the educational employment of these tools lacks empirically founded insights and effective practical guidelines. This study examined surgical residents during computer-based simulator training of basic laparoscopic…

New representational technologies, such as virtual microscopy, create new affordances for medical education. In the article, a study on the following two issues is reported: (a) How does collaborative use of virtual microscopy shape students' engagement with and learning from virtual slides of tissue specimen? (b) How do visual and conceptual cues…

Research has shown that learners do not always engage in appropriate metacognitive and self-regulatory processes while learning complex historical topics. However, little research exists to guide the design of technology-rich learning environments as metacognitive tools in history education. In order to address this issue, we designed a…

This study extends prior research on approaches to teaching and perceptions of the teaching situation by investigating these elements when e-learning is involved. In this study, approaches to teaching ranged from a focus on the teacher and the taught content to a focus on the student and their learning, resembling those reported in previous…