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Choosing a system of interest and identifying the interactions of the system with its environment are crucial steps in applying the relation between work and energy. Responses to problems that we administered in introductory calculus-based physics courses show that many students fail to recognize the implications of a particular choice of system. In some cases, students do not believe that particular groupings of objects can even be considered to be a system. Some errors are more prevalent in situations involving gravitational potential energy than elastic potential energy. The difficulties are manifested in both qualitative and quantitative reasoning.

In entry-level courses it's often a struggle to get students to see that the content has larger significance and intriguing aspects. In most science textbooks, for example, only well-established facts are presented, and they are supported by equally well-know research studies. Textbooks don't usually identify areas of inquiry where the questions have yet to be answered or the findings so far are controversial. And yet often, this is the content most likely to interest students. But can you expect beginning students to read original sources, like research studies? Could you expect them to answer test questions about those articles? A biology professor reports on his experience using research articles and asking test questions about them in an undergraduate course for students majoring in life sciences. Students were assigned a research article to read-the article was relevant to content being covered in class. It was posted on an accessible website. Sometimes the article was discussed during the lectures and sometimes it was the topic of a tutorial session (these were large classes that included tutorial sections). Either way the students had access to the articles before and during the assessment activity.

Johnston's title is an easy-to-update, "good-enough" product that didn't require millions of dollars and years of effort to create and manage. A cadre of Duke computer science graduates, in fact, built the platform in one semester on a $5,000 budget.

Promethean opened on the London Stock Exchange in March 2010 trading at 198 pence ($3.12) and is now trading at 24 pence ($0.39). SMART Technologies, the leader in interactive-whiteboard technology is faring better, but not by much. After opening at $16.62 on the NASDAQ in June 2010, it is now trading at $1.70 per share.

In practice, we found Explain Everything to be more useful to our teaching than Educreations. While the simple screencasts of Educreations are fun to create, truly effective delivery of content such as screencasts depend on flexibility, and that means owning the video output directly. Since Educreations hosts videos only on its own site and only provides various linking and embedding options, neither students nor teachers can download them. Explain Everything offers full ownership and possession of the videos hosted at YouTube, or in MP4 format when downloaded from DropBox

The Engineering Design Process: 1.            Identify a need 2.            Establish requirements 3.            Conduct research 4.            Brainstorm possible approaches 5.            Pick best approach 6.            Develop, design and build prototypes 7.            Test to see if the design works 8.            Begin production         

Last month, we began inviting students across the countries to fire up their Web cameras or camera-phones to send us video commentaries about whether lectures work for them. Below are highlights from the first batch of submissions, which are full of frustration with "PowerPoint abuse" - professors' poor use of slide software that dumps too much information on students in a less-than-compelling fashion.