Pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards computers significantly influence their future adoption of integrating computer technology into their teaching. What are the pedagogical strategies that a teacher education instructor or an instructional designer can incorporate to enhance a pre-service teacher’s comfort level in using computers? In this exploratory report, the researcher synthesizes rela...

Sequential analysis tests the statistical significance of the sequential relationship between acts. This method of analysis has been widely used in pedagogical scholarship; however, it has not yet been applied to the study of language teaching. This study uses sequential analysis to examine the different instructional methods among nine instructors of Chinese as a Second Language (CSL). The ana...

This paper introduces the pedagogical agents and describes its characteristics and roles in multimedia modules. It will also include examples of the use of pedagogical agents in previous studies and effective use of pedagogical agents on learning. Next, pedagogical agent variability in terms of physical (ethnicity, gender, image, voice) and internal features (roles, communication and competency...

on animated pedagogical agents at the Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education (CARTE) at the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute. Animated pedagogical agents, nicknamed guidebots, interact with learners to help keep learning activities on track. They combine the pedagogical expertise of intelligent tutoring systems with the interpersonal interaction...

In this paper we describe the main lines of a teacher preparation model aiming to promote a culture of sharing and re-use of educational resources. Our methodology is based on the analysis of conceptions of trainee teachers as concerns the production and reuse of educational modules and on the use of a collaborative environment, especially designed to support the construction and development of...

This paper summons Bakhtin's principle of visual excess to the field of video research. Bakhtin's dialogic approach emphasises the visual as an effort of the eye, as well as the subjective “I”. Seeing is thus re-caste as an event where subjective and cultural boundaries are encountered, lived, and offer insight to those involved. Video is therefore posited as a visual and axiologic encounter th...

For the past five years, our students have been passing less and less time preparing for lectures and exams. To encourage them to do more exercises, a pedagogical activity was offered outside the classroom. With the goal of making students more active during the problem-solving process, an innovative online environment, Sphinx, was developed. Sphinx proposes a set of exercises with their soluti...

In a language-deficient domain such as buoyancy, students generally find it difficult to explain phenomena that daily saturate their lives such as sinking and floating. To address this problem, we propose a simple and object-related articulation and reflection tool which is embedded in the BSL System (B stands for Body while S and L are for String and Liquid respectively). An analysis of the fi...

Exponent-rules are known to describe experimentally how the observables related to incandescent lamps alter with the change in the rated voltage. Pedagogical derivation of the rules for typical observables like the life, lumens, power, etc. in the case of vacuum bulbs is presented. This is achieved by assuming a steadystate operation of the bulb, parameterizing intrinsic properties of tungsten ...

Qualitative modeling offers the potential for engaging middleschool students in scientific modeling. This paper discusses the design decisions underlying VModel, a qualitative modeling environment that has been used in several studies in Chicago Public School classrooms. We discuss how these decisions were influenced by the constraints imposed by the conceptual development of the students and t...