Interim Report: Pilot Project – Technology Integration in Underserved Schools Using Thinkfinity

This pilot project was conceived as a way to enable teachers in schools with fewer technical resources than typical public schools, or with special needs for students and teachers, to explore and utilize the resources of Thinkfinity in lessons and activities. The project will conclude at the end of May, 2008, and a final, complete report will be submitted at that time. This interim report will describe the assumptions of the project team, how the project was carried out, and highlights of the project to date. The project team consists of the director of the Pace University Computer Learning Center, Sylvia Russakoff, and two master teachers, Babette Kronstadt and Anita Tumminelli. In addition, Debra Blaustein, a graduate student at the Pace University School of Education, assisted at many of the sessions. The Pace Computer Learning Center has been involved in helping teachers learn to integrate technology using Internet resources since 1997, when, under a grant from the then Bell Atlantic Corporation, over 900 teachers were trained over a three year period

Chinese Heritage Culture and Language Initiative

Chinese Heritage Culture and Language Initiative Xiao-lei Wang (Professor) Xiao-lan Rong (Graduate Assistant) School of Education Initial Plan: Produce Chinese Heritage language lessons through traditional Chinese Holidays for afterschool activitie

User experiments with the Eurovision cross-language image retrieval system

In this paper we present Eurovision, a text-based system for cross-language (CL) image retrieval. The system is evaluated by multilingual users for two search tasks with the system configured in English and five other languages. To our knowledge this is the first published set of user experiments for CL image retrieval. We show that: (1) it is possible to create a usable multilingual search engine using little knowledge of any language other than English, (2) categorizing images assists the user's search, and (3) there are differences in the way users search between the proposed search tasks. Based on the two search tasks and user feedback, we describe important aspects of any CL image retrieval system

XANES Study of Structural Disorder in Amorphous Silicon

An investigation of the structure of several amorphous silicon (a-Si) films is presented. Samples were prepared by using the ion beam sputtering technique at different substrate deposition temperatures. X-ray absorption spectroscopy and multiple scattering formalism have been used to detect structural variations of the a-Si films. The analysis of the XANES (X-ray absorption near-edge structure) spectra shows that increasing the substrate deposition temperature leads to a structural change toward a higher-level short-range order.