The Pew Internet and American Life project characterizes the millennials--the first generation to come of age in the new millennium--as the first "always-connected" generation. Significant aspects of culture are changing as a result. A changing world where all students are connected all the time has substantial educational implications. Despite…

The ability to move from one representation of data to another is one of the key characteristics of expert mathematicians and scientists. Cloud computing will offer more opportunities to create and display multiple representations of data, making this skill even more important in the future. The advent of the Internet led to widespread…

President Barack Obama recently issued a call for increased hands-on learning in U.S. schools in an address at the National Academy of Sciences. Obama concluded that the future of the United States depends on one's ability to encourage young people to "create, and build, and invent." In this article, the author discusses National Lab Day (NLD)…

Student-created media offer significant opportunities for engagement and learning. For the past five years, the authors have explored ways to incorporate Web-based authoring tools into the curriculum. In this article, they discuss PrimaryAccess, a suite of online tools that provides students with access to primary source documents on websites such…

Just as the democratization of information through personal computers was a key advance of the 20th century, the democratization of production through improvements in fabrication technologies will be a pivotal development in the 21st century. Digital fabrication is the process of translating a digital design into a physical object. At one time,…

Media--text, images, audio, and video--underwent a transformation from analog to digital formats during the transition from the 20th to the 21st century. Digital media can easily be replicated, downloaded, revised, edited, and reposted, and the implications of this are affecting education, government, entertainment, culture, and society. The…

The shift from analog to digital video transformed the system from a unidirectional analog broadcast to a two-way conversation, resulting in the birth of participatory media. Digital video offers new opportunities for teaching science, social studies, mathematics, and English language arts. The professional education associations for each content…

In the third wave of computing, people will interact with multiple computers in multiple ways in every setting. The value of ubiquitous computing is enhanced and reinforced by another trend: the transition to a Web 2.0 world. In a Web 2.0 world, applications and data reside on the Web itself. Schools are not yet approaching a ratio of one…

In higher education, the number of computer projectors in classrooms has doubled every year for the past five years. A similar trend in K?12 education is occurring now that capable classroom projectors have become available for less than $1,000. At the same time, large-screen displays are becoming common in society; a trend being acceleration by a…

Every school that attempts to integrate technology into its curriculum knows that this effort consumes dollars in the school budget and hours of teacher time. School leaders invest in these resources because they believe that technology can help address meaningful learning problems. Yet, in many cases, their beliefs about the potential of…

Early in the 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee had a powerful idea--the concept of the World Wide Web. The success of this vision produced an unparalleled explosion of information, which in turn resulted in a parallel problem--how to locate the right piece of information. A 2005 study by Hanson and Carlson, published by the Educational Development Center,…

The following three articles in the Learning Connections section (pp. 45?55) consider how technology might be used to facilitate whole-class inquiry in science, mathematics, and social studies classrooms. These illustrative examples are intended tol stimulate thought and discussion among teachers, technology coordinators, and school leaders about…

Podcasting allows distribution of audio files through an RSS feed. This permits users to subscribe to a series of podcasts that are automatically sent to their computer or MP3 player. The capability to receive podcasts is built into freely distributed software such as iPodder as well as the most recent version of iTunes, a free download. In this…

Technology offers a number of opportunities for connecting classrooms with the world. The advent of the Internet has offered unprecedented prospects for classroom connections, but the recent diffusion of digital cameras throughout society offers instructional possibilities as well. This document provides a detailed examination of digital…

A digital story consists of a series of still images combined with a narrated soundtrack to tell a story. This document contains a sequence of seven steps for digital storytelling based on a two-year project in Curry School's Center for Technology and Teacher Education at the University of Virginia. The strategies outlined offer a starting point…