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Students nowadays are hard to be motivated to study lessons with traditional teaching methods. Computers, smartphones, tablets and other smart devices disturb students' attentions. Nevertheless, those smart devices can be used as auxiliary tools of modern teaching methods. In this article, the authors review two popular modern teaching methods: flipped classroom and gamification. Next, they implement flipped classrooms as an element of IoT (Internet of Things) into learning process of computer networks course, by using Cisco networking academy tools, instead of traditional learning. The survey provided to students shows good feedback from students. The authors report the impact of flipped classroom implementation with data obtained from two parallel sections (one flipped classroom and the other traditional classroom). The results show that the flipped classroom approach is better than the traditional classroom approach with a difference of approximately 20% increase in the average of attendance, lab work, quizzes, midterm exams and final exam.

The Alabama Learning Exchange (ALEX; www.alex.state.al.us) is a network-based education system designed and implemented to help improve education in Alabama. It accomplishes this goal by providing a single location for the state's K-12 educators to find information that will help improve their classroom effectiveness. The ALEX system includes courses of study, content standards, lesson plans, Web resources, listservs, a bulletin board, and other educational resources. ALEX was patterned after the Georgia Learning Connections education Web portal (www.glc.k12.ga.us) and input received at a SouthEast Initiatives Regional Technology in Education Consortium (SEIR*TEC) Academy. At the time, there was a significant need for a Web site that could provide teachers with a way to access teaching guidelines, search them, and find lesson plans that could assist in the teaching of those guidelines. ALEX provides this central location for educators to find teaching resources and collaborate with statewide counterparts. Before the deployment of ALEX, most teachers had to share one book of content standards for each course of study. This new education portal makes accessing the content standards much more convenient for teachers. This article describes the system architecture and configuration of ALEX, and includes recommendations for future improvements to the system.

An efficient task allocation system has been developed for 2D mesh architectures that does not require scanning of the whole mesh to locate the available submesh. Computer simulation shows reduced average waiting delay and allocation time in comparison with other systems, regardless of the shape distribution of incoming tasks and mesh size. The optimum performance of parallel computers can be best achieved by allocating the processors to incoming tasks most efficiently.