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Given the primacy of instructional technology in today's college classroom, it is important to understand how faculty use these tools, especially how they adapt specific tools to meet the unique needs of particular faculty or instructional situations. Instructional designers and policymakers face the challenge of introducing innovations into established patterns of tool use and educational practice. As a result, when interventions are designed and implemented without a working understanding of existing practices and workplace conditions, incompatibilities between the demands of the innovation and the constraints of the local setting may result. Instructional designers need robust accounts of local practice, which can ground the design of new initiatives and provide insights into why initiatives are encountering resistance or undesirable adaptations. This brief presents findings from an empirical analysis of course planning and classroom teaching related to instructional technology with the specific aim of providing actionable evidence for policymakers and practitioners. In particular, this analysis focuses on describing the types of instructional technologies faculty consider as part of their local resource base, the specific decision-making "pathways" related to the incorporation of technology into lesson plans, and how faculty actually use technology in the classroom.

Learning through projects while equipped with technology tools allows students to be intellectually challenged while providing them with a realistic snapshot of what the modern office looks like. Through projects, students acquire and refine their analysis and problem-solving skills as they work individually and in teams to find, process, and synthesize information they've found online.

The myriad resources of the online world also provide each classroom with more interesting, diverse, and current learning materials. The Web connects students to experts in the real world and provides numerous opportunities for expressing understanding through images, sound, and text.

students are more likely to stay engaged and on task, reducing behavioral problems in the classroom.

when technology is used as a tool to support students in performing authentic tasks, the students are in the position of defining their g

When students are using technology as a tool or a support for communicating with others, they are in an active role rather than the passive role of recipient of information transmitted by a teacher, textbook, or broadcast. The student is actively making choices about how to generate, obtain, manipulate, or display information. Technology use allows many more students to be actively thinking about information, making choices, and executing skills than is typical in teacher-led lessons.

The teacher's role changes as well. The teacher is no longer the center of attention as the dispenser of information, but rather plays the role of facilitator, setting project goals and providing guidelines and resources, moving from student to student or group to group, providing suggestions and support for student activity. As students work on their technology-supported products, the teacher rotates through the room, looking over shoulders, asking about the reasons for various design choices, and suggesting resources that might be used.

21st century classrooms are different from the traditional high school classroom. The teacher is not the focal point of learning and the students take the lead role. Technology integration is a major component to this shift in teaching style. The inclusion of technology into the classroom and how it influences teaching practice and student engagement was researched for this study. The Director of Technology and building administration from a suburban high school in Southeastern Chester County implemented a grant from Pennsylvania's Department of Education called the "Classrooms for the Future" (CFF) grant. The teachers of English, math, science, and social studies teachers were recipients of the grant and received the Smart Classrooms. The grant allowed for an influx of technology, staff development, and online courses to enhance the teaching and learning process. Teaching practice and student engagement were studied to make a determination if technology use created a positive change. Longitudinal and cross-sectional data were collected from a variety of sources including the student body and teaching staff that participated in CFF. The results indicated that there was a positive relationship between teaching practice and student engagement as well as technology use and student engagement. Recommendations of further implementation and future research studies were discussed. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

We present an analysis of a longitudinal case study whose aim was to understand the processes of integration of a face-to-face and networked collaborative learning technology and pedagogy into a secondary school history-geography classroom. Students carried out a sequence of argumentative tasks relating to sustainable development, including argument generation, sharing and elaboration, debate using a computer-mediated communication, and organization of arguments in a shared diagram. Students' interactions and diagrams were analysed in terms of degree and quality of argumentativity, as well as "catachresis" ("getting round" the software to perform a non-prescribed task). Results run counter to positive systems of ideas and values concerning collaborative learning and its technological mediation in that the scenario did not meet its pedagogical aims, having to be abandoned before its planned end. We discuss possible explanations for this "failure story" in terms of the articulation between everyday, technology-related and educational discourse genres, with their associated social "milieux," as well as the social structure of the classroom. The relevance of these aspects for future attempts to integrate such technologies is discussed. In conclusion, we discuss a vision of learning that takes into account students who do not accept to play the educational game.