This study aimed to explore the principals’ perspectives in terms of their understanding, support and expectation towards programming education among primary schools in Hong Kong. 147 primary school principals (30.2%) responded to the survey. The results indicated that all principals have positive perspectives towards programming education in all three aspects. Their major concern was the competency of teachers in teaching programming. They suggested that more teacher development courses should be provided to address this problem. Copyright © 2019 Central China Normal University.

The study looked into how school partnership generates benefit. It aimed to identify the structures of partnership among collaborating schools and to examine elements that can contribute to sustainable eLearning development. Six cluster project cases were purposefully selected from an e-Learning pilot scheme in Hong Kong to investigate how school partnership functions in e-Learning implementation through semi-structured focus group interviews. The findings identified five types of partnership structures that were adopted by the six e-Learning cluster projects, namely, a traditional leader-centered team leadership; a fusion of traditional leader-centered and distributed team leadership; a distributed-coordinated team leadership; an intermediate form of distributed-coordinated and distributed-fragmented team leadership; and a duplicated distributed team leadership structure. Elements including mutual benefit, active school engagement with dynamic communication and interaction, reasonable team size, and co-building of online sharing platform for channeling ideas and actions efficiently are critical to keep e-Learning school partnership sustainable. Copyright © 2019 National Taiwan Normal University.

This study aims to establish a robust measurement to obtain a comprehensive understanding of perceptions of programming education (POPE) of teacher and principal groups. In this study, the POPE scale contains three dimensions: (a) understanding in programming (UP), (b) support for programming (SP), and (c) expectation of programming (EP). Self-reported questionnaires were administrated among 258 teachers and 229 principals. Multigroup analyses were used among the two groups. The results of measurement invariance tests show that configural and metric invariance are fully supported, and scalar invariance is partially supported, suggesting the factor structures, loadings, and most item intercepts of the POPE scale are equivalent across the groups examined. Implications of the study are discussed.
[Copyright of Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment is the property of SAGE Publications. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0734282918787670]

Schools around the globe increasingly realized the importance of technology and its application in the education system. To guarantee a successful educational innovation, schools seek out different parties for valuable opinions. Among them, parents are the important feedback providers, because their attitudes are influential on children's academic performance. Moreover, their involvement and support are considered the key factor that facilitates an effective implementation of programming education at schools. This study aimed at developing and validating an instrument measuring parents' perceptions of programming education among P-12 schools in Hong Kong. We propose that parents; perceptions of programming education is a multidimensional construct which constitutes (a) understanding, (b) support, and (c) expectation. In total, 524 questionnaires were collected from the parents who attended programming workshops and seminars. Exploratory factor analysis shows evidence for the three-dimensional construct. Confirmatory factor analysis reconfirms the measurement structure. Implications of the study are discussed.
[Copyright of Journal of Educational Computing Research is the property of SAGE Publications. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0735633118783182]

As digital technology is increasingly a part of all sectors of society, educational approaches must be developed in order to nurture students’ ability to see the world through a computational lens. One way to achieve this goal is to promote Computational Thinking (CT) for young learners. The CoolThink@JC project is a four-year curriculum pilot designed to integrate CT into Hong Kong upper-primary level schools. The CoolThink framework for curriculum development is structured around computational concepts, practices and perspectives adapted from the framework of Brennan and Resnick (2012). This adapted framework motivated the choice of learning activities for CoolThink. This paper focuses on one aspect of that framework, namely computational practices. Here, we describe how activities in the CoolThink curriculum can promote the computational practices highlighted by the framework.
[Copyright © 2017 The Hong Kong Jockey Club.]

This study aimed to investigate parents' understanding of, support for and concerns about e-learning and proposed a school–parent partnership distributing responsibilities to parents and schools based on the results of the study. A total of 61 parents from 21 schools in an e-learning pilot scheme in Hong Kong responded to a questionnaire survey and focus group interviews. Results indicated that there was a high correlation between parental understanding and support for e-learning although parents demonstrated only a basic level of understanding. Four types of parental support and six major areas of parental concern were identified. These results shed light on the school–parent partnership whereby parents should implement a proactive e-learning policy at home to monitor, support and inspire e-learning. Schools should formulate a holistic policy to address parents' concerns responsively and proactively to gain support. Schools can enhance parents' pedagogical understanding of e-learning and address parental concerns through school–parent communication and peer support among parents.
[Copyright © 2017 Association for Information Technology in Teacher Education.]

With the fast development of mobile technologies, mobile learning has been adopted by more and more students and staff in higher education institutions. However, most students and staff tend to explore mobile learning as individuals, and there is a lack of systematic exchange of ideas and strategies related to mobile learning among them. This chapter reports on a project on building a mobile learning community (MLC) to promote mobile learning in a Hong Kong tertiary institution. The research questions are as follows: ‘What are the key factors in building a successful mobile learning community?’ and ‘How can the effectiveness of the MLC be evaluated?’ The key factors identified in building a successful mobile learning community are recruitment of community members, establishment of a mobile learning community website as a platform for exchange of ideas, organization of sharing seminars/workshops, making an impact on students’ learning and on staff development. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the mobile learning community will also be deliberated. It is hoped that this chapter can provide some practical guidance and useful references for those who wish to establish a mobile learning community in their institutions in order to promote Scholarship of Learning & Teaching (SoLT).

Higher education institutions around the world have increasingly been concerned with staff professional development (SPD) programmes for academic and teaching (A/T) staff. Since its establishment in 1994, an education university in Hong Kong (which we will refer to as the University) has offered primarily teacher education to foster the development of quality teachers. To meet the demand for students’ holistic and whole-person development for the twenty-first century, the University has sought to broaden the range of programmes offered, introducing the concept of ‘Education-Plus’. Under the ‘Education-Plus’ vision, the University has been expanding non-education programmes rapidly since 2010. Many new A/T staff with limited teaching experience have been recruited, needing professional development (PD) to enhance their skills and knowledge. Since 2013, the Centre for Learning, Teaching and Technology (LTTC) has designed and developed an SPD programme to allow A/T staff to enrich their PD and ultimately enhance student learning. The evaluation of the current SPD programme activities revealed that the PD activities were beneficial to A/T’s teaching and their PD, but the question has arisen as to whether the current SPD programme is effective, e.g. whether A/T staff have obtained and applied new knowledge and skills to teaching. This paper will discuss the design of the current SPD programme and analyze its activities. The design outlined in ‘Three Stages of Professional Development: The Cycle of Change’ (Bellanca, 2009) will be referred to in order to develop an effective SPD programme. The paper will also design and propose a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of the SPD programme and its implementation cycle.

In its latest IT in Education Strategy, the government of Hong Kong is committed to develop an online resource bank of curriculum-based digital resources for supporting learning and teaching in school education. The study reported herein aimed to conceptualize the framework for developing such online resource bank in Hong Kong. For collecting solid information from a wide spectrum of relevant stakeholders, 12 sessions of focus group discussions were conducted with school leaders, teachers of major subjects, students, parents, government officials, and educational publishers in the school education sector in Hong Kong. The results found that teachers in Hong Kong were experienced in using digital resources, in particular PowerPoint, video and animation, for supporting subject teaching and learning. The results also asserted the need of an online resource bank in Hong Kong for teachers to accurately access curriculum-based learning and teaching resources. Based on the expectations identified in this study, three options are recommended for the development of the target online resource bank. The first option suggests the compilation of digital entities, such as electronic texts, presentation slides, images, videos and animations, for curriculum delivery. The second option suggests the organization of the digital resources into teaching schemes for delivering subject curricula, especially for those subjects with limited textbooks available in the market. The third options suggests the compilation of learning materials, such as guiding worksheets, with digital resources for students, especially those with average and high learning motivation, to conduct theme-based or project-based self-regulated learning.

Teaching professionals are crucial for the successful realization of e-Learning in school education. Major Asian cities/regions such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Beijing continuously invest in teacher development on e-Learning to empower frontline teachers and school leaders to advance school education in the digital era. This article aims to review and discuss the activity contents, delivery approaches, and scaling-up methods of teacher development on e-Learning in these four major Asian cities/regions. There is a unique trend identified in each of the four major Asian cities/regions. Singapore focuses on professional peer-learning communities for supporting practice-based teacher development on the effective use of ICT for learning and teaching in the classroom. Hong Kong focuses on building teacher communities for observing, engaging, and reflecting and succeeding school-based e-Learning initiatives for student-centered learning. Taiwan focuses on offering university-supported teacher development on the effective integration of e-Learning into students' learning, especially for learning twenty-first century skills. Beijing focuses on promoting self-directed teacher development on the advancement of ICT infusion in classroom teaching, especially the ICT-supported innovative pedagogies for K-12. Implications are drawn in order to provide a point of reference for other cities/regions in tailoring the future provision of teacher development for e-Learning in the twenty-first century.
[Copyright © 2016 Beijing Normal University.]