It is important to promote the use of ICT, used in a broad sense, by teachers in the field of early childhood education. This paper discusses a case study of a pre-service kindergarten teacher in Hong Kong Institute of Education who enrolled on a course in Computer Applications in Early Childhood Education Curriculum in 2006. The research methodologies used were in-depth interview and content analysis. The case study aims to explore this pre-service student's conception of ICT and understanding of the strategies to integrate it into a one-day teaching plan. The research data showed that a range of technologies were used and identified the reasons for their use. It was found that the following factors influenced the student's decisions: experience of using technologies; beliefs about using technologies; the organizational environment; the acceptance of ICT use by kindergarten teachers; and the technical support and professional training available. The case study gave insights into the views of pre-service kindergarten teachers on preparing and implementing technologies in the classroom and should assist teacher educators to develop powerful training strategies for integrating ICT into early childhood education.

Language in its broad sense refers to a message system communicated from one to another. It is not uncommon for teachers to teach with a specific kind of language to pupils, which creates unequal relations of power, particularly between teachers and pupils in classroom context. In turn, language itself becomes a discourse including the ways teachers speak during PE lessons. This study investigates the language used by two student teachers in PE lessons during field experience in a primary school in Hong Kong. The PE lessons conducted by the participants were video taped and analysed in the aspects of context, teaching process, and most of all, the language used during the lessons. Results indicate that the participants used language to teach and control pupils learning and discipline consciously and unconsciously. As student teachers, their teaching behaviour and performance were much influenced by the school traditions, such as routine training. However, through languages during the process of teaching, they exercised power and control over their pupils on thinking and ways of problem solving. Hidden curriculum such as sexism also existed unconsciously as another discourse in the lessons.

This paper explores how Learning Study, a Hong Kong version of the Japanese Lesson Study, serves to relate teaching to learning at the classroom level. Learning Study is premised on a conceptual framework that builds on three types of variation in a specific object of learning: variation in students' understanding of the object of learning (V1); variation in teachers' understanding and ways of handling the object (V2); and the use of patterns of variation based on the Theory of Variation (V3). Each Learning Study begins with a careful consideration of what pupils are supposed to learn (i.e. object of learning) and what is/are critical for them to be able to learn it (i.e. critical features). A pre- test is used to help the team to collect pupils' prior understandings of the object of learning which may constitute their learning difficulties. Taking into account students' different understandings of the object of learning, teachers collaborate with researchers from tertiary institutes to develop ways to structure the lesson in terms of pattern of variation aiming to make possible the learning of the critical features identified for the object of learning. Teachers in the team then teach the lesson in cycles. Lesson observation, post-lesson conference, post- test and post-lesson student interview are arranged after each cycle of lesson and the data collected are analyzed and triangulated to optimize the improvement that can be made in the next cycle. This paper draws on the data of two learning studies supported by the government-funded Progressive and Innovative Primary Schools Project of the Hong Kong Institute of Education and discusses how the teachers became aware of what was crucial in teaching the chosen topic – the critical features that students had to attend to, by relating the act of teaching to the corresponding student learning outcomes.