The acceleration of e-Learning around the world has driven the major cities/regions in the Asia–Pacific region such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Beijing to plan and implement official policies on e-Learning for enhancing the quality of school education. This article aims to review experiences and then draw lessons of these four major Asian cities/regions in the development of e-Learning policies on the dimensions of infrastructure, curriculum integration, students learning, teacher professional development, as well as leadership and capacity building. It is identified that each of the four major Asian cities/regions has its own area of emphasis in the planning of future e-Learning policies, with Singapore focusing on scaling up good practices of e-Learning among teacher community; Hong Kong focusing on creating digital classrooms supported by wireless networking for student-centered learning; Taiwan focusing on cultivating students with 21st century skills through daily subject teaching; and Beijing focusing on providing digital resources and e-textbooks geared to school curricula. Five implications with regard to e-Learning policies are further made in order to provide a point of references for other cities/regions to develop future e-Learning policies for school education in the 21st century.
[Copyright © Springer].

Liberal studies is a new subject in the new senior secondary curriculum in Hong Kong. This study attempted to identify factors that shape liberal studies student teachers' decisions in lesson planning. Based on interview data and lesson plans developed by the student teachers, this article maintains that four factors interacted with the subject features of liberal studies to shape the student teachers' planning decisions, namely, teacher knowledge, curriculum requirements, materials and resources, and interaction with equal and more capable partners. This paper further looks into how teacher knowledge expresses itself at different stages of lesson planning. The findings suggest that to facilitate enquiry learning in students, liberal studies teachers need to adopt an enquiry stance in lesson planning. This paper argues that the limitations of liberal studies student teachers' content knowledge need to be addressed in teacher preparation programmes and suggests teacher networking as one way to strengthen novice liberal studies teachers' content preparation. The implications for teacher education are discussed.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2011.558287]

Hong Kong adopted the principles of School-based Management (SBM) as a basis for initiating its project of "School Management Initiative" (SMI) in 1991, and imposed the SBM scheme in all primary and secondary schools in 2000. An essential feature of the scheme is the requirement of all schools to produce an Annual School Plan to guide its activities during the year so as to ensure more systematic planning and evaluation of programs of activities in schools and to report their performance. The author has been invited to provide related consultancy services in many primary and secondary schools since 1998. A postal survey was carried out in late 2001/2002 to identify a number of issues related to the implementation of annual school plans in Hong Kong primary and secondary schools. A total of 1,251 questionnaires filled in by teachers were collected from 36 primary and 27 secondary schools. This paper presents some of the difficulties encountered by school teachers in their writing up and implementation of annual school plans as identified through the author's consultancy work and the written responses in the questionnaires, and describes some useful techniques introduced to schools that were being practised and found to be useful. It was found that it usually takes one planning cycle (one year) of experience together with proper staff training and guidance before school teachers really get the confidence of implementing school planning.
一九九一年，香港按「校本管理」原則推行「學校管理計劃」。「校本管理」概念更於二○○○年在各中小學全面執行。「校本管理」精髓在於要求所有學校制定周年計劃書，以釐定學校在該學年所舉辦的活動，確保校內各項活動及計劃的策劃及評估工作均能有條不紊地進行，並就其表現作出匯報。
作者自一九九八年起獲邀出任多間中小學之校本管理計劃顧問。並於二○○一年底至二○○二年間，以郵寄方式向香港各中小學教師進行問卷調查，以探討推行學校周年計劃所引起的一些問題，最後成功收回三十六間小學及二十七間中學教師所交回共1,251 份問卷。作者從顧問工作及問卷調查所收取的書面回應中發現，教師在草擬周年計劃書及推行有關計劃時均遇上困難，本文找出其中一些例子並加以論述，同時亦提出一些在學校行之有效的有用技巧。調查發現大部份學校需要一年的策劃週期汲取經驗，再加上教師接受適當的訓練及指導後，方能滿有信心地切實推行學校計劃。
[Copyright of New Horizons: The Journal of Education, Hong Kong Teachers' Associationl is the property of Hong Kong Teachers' Association