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The role of the humble school bus in transforming education in America

Everyone knows the yellow school bus. It’s been invisible and also omnipresent for a century. Antero Garcia shows how the U.S. school bus, its form unaltered for decades, is the most substantial piece of educational technology to ever shape how schools operate. As it noisily moves young people across the country every day, the bus offers the opportunity for a necessary reexamination of what “counts” as educational technology. Particularly in light of these buses being idled in pandemic times, All through the Town questions what we take for granted and what we overlook in public schooling in America, pushing for liberatory approaches to education that extend beyond notions of school equity.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Kimberly A. Scott explores this question and others as she details the National Science Foundation-funded enrichment project COMPUGIRLS. This groundbreaking initiative teaches tech skills to adolescent girls of color but, as importantly, offers a setting that emphasizes empowerment, community advancement, and self-discovery. Scott draws on her experience as an architect of COMPUGIRLS to detail the difficulties of translating participants' lives into a digital context while tracing how the program evolved. The dramatic stories of the participants show them blending newly developed technical and communication skills in ways designed to spark effective action and bring about important change.

A compelling merger of theory and storytelling, COMPUGIRLS provides a much-needed roadmap for understanding how girls of color can find and define their selves in today's digital age.

Evaluating skills and knowledge capture lies at the cutting edge of contemporary higher education where there is a drive towards increasing evaluation of classroom performance and use of digital technologies in pedagogy. Developing Educators for the Digital Age is a book that provides a narrative account of teacher development geared towards the further usage of technologies (including iPads, MOOCs and whiteboards) in the classroom presented via the histories and observation of a diverse group of teachers engaged in the multiple dimensions of their profession.

Drawing on the insights of a variety of educational theories and approaches (including TPACK) it presents a practical framework for capturing knowledge in action of these English language teachers – in their own voices – indicating how such methods, processes and experiences shed light more widely on related contexts within HE and may be transferable to other situations.

This book will be of interest to the growing body of scholars interested in TPACK theory, or communities of practice theory and more widely anyone concerned with how new pedagogical skills and knowledge with technology may be incorporated in better practice and concrete instances of teaching.

Today's emphasis on metrics and personalization make evidence-based instruction an imperative. In this practice-based handbook, the authors draw on the research of the humanistic psychologist and educator Carl Rogers to present an empathetic approach to information literacy sessions, reference service, and outreach.  With an eye on everyday library work, they offer concrete, empirically-based strategies to connect with learners at all levels. Offering plentiful examples of pedagogy in action, this book covers:

• 6 cognitive principles for organizing information literacy instruction, with sample worksheets and organization tools for instruction planning;
• how to establish rapport and kindle learners' motivation;
• tactics for transcending "cite 5 sources" and other uninspiring research assignments;
• educational evidence debunking the mythical perception that because students are skilled at computers and mobile technology, they already know how to do research;
• questions to keep in mind for inspiring autonomous learning;
• the power of story, as described by Joan Didion, Brené Brown's Ted Talk, and educational psychology research;
• the science behind information overload; and
• a balanced framework for evaluating specific educational technology tools.

Fusing theory with practice, this handbook is a valuable resource to help every practitioner connect with learners more effectively.

A collection of essays engaging with digital scholarship and new technologies.

Contributors to this volume engage with digital scholarship in several ways: by creating digital projects, often in multidisciplinary, collaborative environments; by applying digital methodologies and tools to explore research questions; and by speculating about the potential directions that digital scholarship can take to tackle existing research areas that could benefit from new perspectives. Together, the chapters demonstrate how various digital approaches—from network analysis to web mapping, VR and AR technologies, digital editions, databases, and archives—are all contributing in creative and effective ways to expand our knowledge of the past, to help ask and answer questions at a scale that was unimaginable before the digital turn, and to reshape early modern studies in the twenty-first century.