Digital Play

This chapter showcases a new framework (Technology and Play Framework) for teachers to consider when planning the use of digital technologies in the Early Years of formal schooling. It also presents the findings from a pilot study conducted with an F-1 (Foundation year and year 1) class in an Australian primary school that demonstrated how this framework could direct the effective use of a specific digital technology in terms of student learning outcomes with particular focus on literacy and numeracy. While play is recognised as an essential component of good practice in early childhood settings, it needs to be reconsidered and aligned to incorporate emerging digital technologies and complementary pedagogical practices in order to support authentic learning.

Apple’s iBooks Author

This chapter discusses Apple’s iBooks Author, a brand-new Mac application intended for textbook writers and publishers to create e-textbooks. This chapter provides insight on why IBA holds a prominent place in the field of education and will change our classroom landscape, that is, how we teach and learn. The main purpose of this chapter is to explore IBA’s potential, possible controversial issues, pedagogical meanings, and implementation challenges of using it as a classroom textbook. The chapter includes lessons learned from the leading countries in implementing e-textbooks in the classroom, such as South Korea and Malaysia.

Fostering Collaboration and Digital Literacy with Mobile Technology

Multimodal literacies are an essential construct of the 21st century classroom, and mobile technology will serve to facilitate the collaborative creation of multimodal digital content. The mission of this chapter is to highlight the potential of mobile technology as a means for enabling collaborative activities and fostering effective communication. Over the past several decades, there has been a tremendous shift in how educators and students communicate, learn, and share ideas. The proliferation of mobile computing devices to a near-ubiquitous level has amplified this shift and compels educators to seek ways to harness the power of these devices to break down the barriers of the traditional classroom in an effort to make way for a more collaborative, reflective learning experience. Drawing on recent research on the cognitive benefits of multimodal literacy instruction and its potential for increasing opportunities for student engagement, this chapter provides a rationale for and subsequently sketches a practical approach for fostering collaborative, multimodal literacy practices through mobile technology.

The Development and Application of Regional Education Informatization in China

Education informatization has become a significant symbol of educational modernization. Over the past 20 years, China has made remarkable achievements in the development of information technology infrastructure, resources, and personnel training. Despite the initial success on the education informatization management, China is still facing many challenges in primary and secondary schools’ education informatization: ineffective digital educational resource sharing mechanism (lack of public information technology service platform), insufficient quality education resources (i.e., campus network infrastructure and teachers’ information technology capabilities), poorly integrated education informationalized system management (i.e., slow deployment and limited functionality), insufficient information capabilities training for the teacher, imbalanced development in regional education informatization (i.e., funding shortage in rural areas), and lack of sustainable development policies. Thus, how to resolve these challenges and to prepare primary and secondary schools for the 21st century classroom has become an urgent issue in reaching China’s ambitious goal of 100% network connection. By examining the current status of education informationalized development in three different economic areas in China, this chapter collects, complies, compares, and evaluates the application and development of regional education informatization including information technology hardware, informational network, information capabilities, and education informatization development funds in primary and secondary schools. Recommendations are made to improve the process of education informatization development and application; to reduce the regional gaps in education informatization; to accelerate the development of network resources, network infrastructure, and informationalized platform; to improve information technology capability training; and to establish better policies for sustainable development of education informatization in China.

Young People in a Gallery with a Digital Camera

Digital technologies that serve to develop new ways of engaging with each other and promote learning are challenging how collaborations are formed and enacted in the educational setting. This chapter discusses a project set in Melbourne, Australia, that involved learning about what young people think about visiting a gallery as part of an education program. The twist to this project was placing a digital camera in each of the hands of Grade 3 to 6 primary school students. The investigation centered around seeing if it was possible to integrate digital cameras in a specifically designed gallery program that required students to generate digital still photographs to share their experiences. One of the aims for this approach was for the student voice to inform the gallery educators of what they were engaging with in the gallery space and to influence future program development. The digital camera itself challenged ways of working in the gallery space, as too did listening to young people’s voice to inform learning and teaching as a part of the gallery education programs. Paramount to this project was seeing the transformation of K-12 education in the gallery setting particularly with the digital camera seen as a renewed or revisioned technology, that is, a technology that would not normally be utilized in the gallery space for educational programs. In building on the digital camera’s familiar use in the primary school context, this project highlights the integration of this device as a hand-held mobile technology that supports the crossing of boundaries between school and gallery learning environments and that supports young people to be trusted, honored, and allowed to explore their own voice and choice.

Integrating the Arts into Early Childhood Teacher Education Through Technology

Integrating the arts into the early childhood classroom is considered one of the effective pedagogies for children to learn different disciplines. However, most students in early childhood teacher education programs do not have experience in art, nor do they generally create art themselves. However, these future teachers and their students alike are surrounded with visual culture, immersed in technology, and grew up with television and other devices as indispensable parts of their lives, so these can provide portals for teaching them about the arts and interdisciplinary content integration. Teaching future Early Childhood Education (ECE) teachers creative pedagogies for integrating the arts into their classrooms through the use of technology is essential. The purpose is not just to help them understand the connections between the visual arts and what they see around them on television, tablet, and computer, but also, perhaps optimistically, to encourage them to be advocates for the arts in the lives of their students. In this chapter, the authors contemplate some of the challenges in building those connections for ECE students. They consider the questions: How can we build their confidence with this subject matter and guide them to integrate art forms through technology into their curricula? How can we foster in these future teachers a creative sensibility that recognizes the arts as a fundamental shared human means of expressing identity, understandings, beliefs, and ideas? How can we utilize very accessible community resources to encourage this transformation? This chapter describes a hands-on approach developed for guiding ECE majors who have little or no arts experience to understand, appreciate, and engage in the arts through technology and the interdisciplinary possibilities of Puppetry Arts. They describe the philosophy, process, resources, and outcomes of the course and offer recommendations for integrating the arts into early childhood education coursework through technology.

Finding and Evaluating Great Educational Games

Digital games are increasingly being used as educational tools. They are intrinsically motivating for many students and offer a natural learning environment. However, not all games are equally effective in the classroom and there is thus a need for frameworks to guide teachers so that learning goals are aligned with a game’s goals and to determine whether or not the game design supports effective learning. This chapter offers an analysis framework that can be used by classroom teachers to understand the different ways that games can support learning and to critique specific games to determine whether or not they meet the learning requirements. The chapter includes a checklist for teachers, as well as a feedback form for students who playtest games for use in the classroom.

GBL as PBL

GBL is proving to be a promising and engaging tool for STEM learning. How GBL affects content and mastery is unknown, however. For GBL to be more than an engaging tool for delivery of basic knowledge, it must be designed to achieve the goals of PBL. PBL achieves mastery by using principles of inquiry to promote constructive learning. The challenge is to keep GBL engaging while incorporating inquiry strategies into gameplay. This can be achieved through immersive micromanagement games that incorporate content mastery objectives into player strategies for advancement in the game's plot. Complexity introduced through evolving game scenarios should push players towards decisions based on content lessons. Players should be allowed to personalize their experience through the use of avatars and should play a role in the execution of strategies within the game. Team play and competition can also enhance the PBL elements and increase cognitive outcomes.

Interactive Boards in Schools

This chapter examines middle school and high school teachers' use of interactive boards in the classroom, as well as the goals behind this use and the difficulties encountered throughout it. Ten middle school and high school science and mathematics teachers who use the interactive board for teaching science and mathematics were interviewed to elicit their practices, goals, and difficulties when using interactive boards in the classroom. The first two stages of the constant comparison method were utilized to analyze the collected data. The research findings show that science and mathematics teachers made different uses of the interactive board, which could be related to treating scientific relations, phenomena, and experiments, as well as practicing learned materials and engaging students in building activities in games and in discussions. Utilizing the different options of the interactive board, the participating teachers had various goals: giving students the ability to investigate, motivating them to learn, attracting them to the lesson, making them enjoy their learning, encouraging their collaboration, shortening the teaching time, and loading previously taught lessons. Using the interactive board in the classrooms, the teachers encountered some difficulties, such a: technical difficulties, owning the appropriate skills for using effectively the interactive board’s different options, preparing appropriate activities, fulfilling students' expectations, and keeping class order.

Promoting a Balanced Development of High Quality Teacher Resources with Network Technology

In China, the availability of high quality teacher resources varies from region to region and differs even among different schools in the same region. Two approaches were taken to solve this resource problem (i.e., traditional educational support and traditional instructional research). The former approach was attempted to relieve the shortages of high quality teacher resources in resources-poor schools by sending excellent teachers to assist in instruction and school management. The latter approach was intended to improve teachers’ teaching skills within resources-poor schools by conducting instructional research on the spot. However, both had little effect. What can be done to increase the availability of high quality teacher resources? What is the most effective way to improve the teachers’ teaching skills? How does one find new ways to solve the problem of imbalanced allocation of high quality teacher resources? These questions have puzzled the educational professional for a long time. This chapter introduces two innovated approaches to develop high quality teacher resources by using network technology. Network-based educational research approaches allow the teachers in resource-rich schools to teach the students of resource-poor schools through network video conference systems without leaving his or her own school. The network-based instructional research approach enables the teachers of both resource-rich and resource-poor schools to build alliances according to disciplines and to collaborate on instruction by network videoconference systems.