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David M. Marcovitz suggests that public education has not changed very much in the last 100 years, in spite of information and communication technology (ICT). Is ICT simply another educational fad or will it have a lasting impact on K-12 education? Lisa C. Yamagata-Lynch and Sharon Smaldino maintain there have been several examples of effective uses of technology in K-12. However, the inability of public schools and higher education to properly train teachers has severely limited the success of using computer technology in most public schools. Sharon Tettegah, Diana Betout, and Kona Taylor describes cyber-bullying, as a phenomenon that is creating difficulty for educators and has led to the humiliation of many students across the nation. David Williamson Shaffer and Kurt D. Squire argue that researchers of educational technology should study Pasteur's Quadrant for “use-inspired basic research” to create better models to evaluate educational practices and the use of technology. John Keller and Matthew J. Stuve discuss teacher quality, a topic that has taken on greater importance since NCLB. They also talk about the use of “teacher as brand” as a construct to further affect teacher quality. In connection, branding has been a very successful venture in the commercial context.

That teaching and learning with technology has no meaning apart from teachers and learners is the important message of this fine collection of essays. The editors, Sharon Tettegah and Richard Hunter, are to be commended for their timely volume entitled, Technology and Education: Issues in Administration, Policy, and Applications in K-12 Schools. While the message that machines are meaningless without human minds seems self-evident, there is something about computerized technologies – in schools especially – that undermines and over-rides this important insight. At a time when the wonders of “wireless” and “wiki” distract more than ever from the main educational game, this wide-ranging anthology presents a persuasive and powerful testimony reaffirming the fundamental principle that educational technologies are only as effective as the curriculums, the pedagogies, and the assessment practices that frame their usage.

Recent reports in the news media indicates a vast majority of children are connected to the Internet and the World Wide Web. As more children connect online, they bring their behaviors that were once principally face-to-face, to the Internet. This chapter is concerned with online aggression, specifically school age bullying. Children's capacity to bully their peers is growing because of increased use of electronic and wireless information communication technologies. Anonymity provides a venue to engage in risky cyber-bullying for today's children. Schools district need to be aware of the dangers and psychological effects of cyber-bullying.

Although “acceptable use” policy (AUP) constitutes a fairly straightforward perspective in many school districts – students’ ethical, legal, and personally responsible educational usage of electronic technologies – there is a more ambiguous area of which administrators need to be aware. For example, what constitutes an AUP and who is responsible for creating them and upholding their guidelines? Other issues that need to be thought about are what makes up “appropriate” (instructionally acceptable) standards of educational quality in terms of the content of web sites?

Diana Betout is a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Department of Curriculum and Instruction. She is studying teacher education. She plans to pursue her career as an elementary teacher.

It has been well documented that the successful use of technology in K-12 education improves student achievement. However, both K-12 schools and higher education institutions have not been able to systematically provide preservice and inservice teachers with adequate training and support. This chapter will examine the K-12 school–university partnership literature, and identify critical support elements that are necessary for successful change related to technology both in higher education and the K-12 classrooms. Additionally, we will introduce two characteristics from the NCATE Partnership Standards and how schools and universities can use them to guide relationships and how they approach the school technology reform process.

Copyright can be confusing and intimidating for schools. Copyright is difficult enough to understand when dealing with paper, but as new technologies enter the mix, copyright is often ignored as obsolete or is so confusing that even beneficial and legal uses are avoided. While copyright places restrictions on some use of material, educators have many rights to use work created by others. This chapter helps guide educators through the issues relating to copyright and technology so copyright is not used as an automatic “no” to legitimate uses or an automatic “yes” for questionable uses.

In his book Pasteur's Quadrant, Donald Stokes (1997) argued that research projects can be described by their contributions to theoretical understanding and the solution of practical problems. Building on this model, scholars have suggested that educational research should focus more or less exclusively on what Stokes called “use-inspired basic research.” With this move has come a focus on projects with the potential to create systemic change – and the concurrent devaluation of naturalistic studies of learning in context and design research to develop innovative educational interventions. We argue that this current predilection is based on a fundamental misreading of the processes through which scientific investigation addresses practical problems, and (more important) is counter-productive for the field of educational technology. To make this case, we look more closely at the operationalization of Stokes’ quadrant model in the field of education, suggesting that its short-term focus on systemic change is based on a misunderstanding of history. We use Latour's (1983) study of Pasteur to suggest an alternative lever model for the research-based transformation of educational practices through educational technologies. By way of illustration, we use a brief example of a research project in educational technology to ground a discussion of the broader implications of this alternative conceptualization of the process of education research.

This chapter will outline the theory behind collaborative learning environments and describe several projects that best exemplify these theories and how best to incorporate them into the learning styles of the Net Generation's way of learning. Through partnerships with the St. Louis science center and the Children's Museum of Manhattan, visuality and interactivity have been incorporated into displays that demonstrate how these sorts of projects encourage students to collaborate in different ways as well as how teachers can introduce material in a variety of multidisciplinary formats.