The New Senior Secondary (NSS) curriculum has been implemented in Hong Kong since September, 2009. One major objective of this initiative is to help students acquire critical thinking, information technology and life-long learning skills through the Independent Enquiry Learning (IEL) approach. Geographical Information System (GIS) and Satellite Remote Sensing (RS) can be very effective tools for multiple subjects in the NSS curriculum, particularly in Geography and Liberal Studies. However, there exists a huge technical barrier for teachers to apply the technologies in the ordinary classrooms. Hence, this project, funded by the Quality Education Fund of the Hong Kong SAR Government, aims to support the teachers of Hong Kong using GIS and satellite remote sensing in their classrooms. The implementation approach is designed totally from a practitioner's perspective; hence, the fundamental brief of this project is to develop useful resources for teachers and the products shall be; 1.) Teachers and Students - Friendly; 2.) Encourage students to practice critical thinking and spatial thinking skills; 3.) Encourage students to apply knowledge / experience acquired through the learning activities to the other field of interests; 4.) Lowering the barrier of transforming teachers’ / students’ creativity to practical GIS / Remote Sensing projects and learning activities. Products of this project include a comprehensive resources pool of GIS Data and Remote Sensing Images; a teacher-friendly GIS and satellite image processing software; teachers’ training workshops and mostly important, school-based supports. This paper will highlight the first batch of achievements and products, evaluations, successful cases of classroom implementation as well as the feedback from the frontline teachers.
[Copyright © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Yasushi Asami.]

This paper introduces a scalable virtual learning environment of the Chinese University of Hong Kong; an explicitly geographical, immersive, and sharable 3D learning space with comprehensive social elements. It is characterized by multi-user collaborative modeling, group learning approaches of geo-collaboration, social space-oriented hierarchical avatars, and knowledge exchanging and sharing based on virtual geographic experiments. Applications for the purpose of public education and virtual geographic experiment, and indicated future works prove the possibility to offer a greater opportunity to foster interdisciplinary collaborations, revitalize teaching patterns and learning contents, improve learners' cognitive abilities to solve problems, and enhance their understanding of scientific concepts and processes.
[Copyright of Taylor & Francis. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2010.535028]