High-quality teacher-child interactions benefit children’s learning and developmental trajectories. However, professional development (PD) opportunities for early childhood teachers on how to interact with children are typically insufficient. To enhance teacher-child interactional quality in Hong Kong kindergartens, we designed an online PD entitled Chat with Children, composed of 10 units of learning resources and activities. The objective of this study was to explore how this online PD influenced teachers’ beliefs and intentions regarding teacher-child interaction. Participants were 217 in-service Hong Kong kindergarten teachers. Pre-post evaluation was conducted to examine teachers’ beliefs and intentions in the dimensions of Organization of the Teaching Experience, Group Sensitivity, Encouragement of Communication, and Behavioral Support. After taking the course, teachers had stronger beliefs and intentions to organize interactive activities, address children’s needs with sensitivity, and engage children in communications. Furthermore, teachers believed that they should give children more freedom to settle conflicts, rather directing their misbehaviours immediately. This study provides evidence on the potential of online PD to enhance teachers’ beliefs and intentions regarding how to engage children. Implications, limitations, and future research are discussed. Copyright © 2025 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have become a popular topic in the education field. Most of the schools in Hong Kong focus on how to properly use AI software to help students' learning experience. As this is still a relatively new technology, the stance for most of the schools in Hong Kong is skeptical. This study aims to find out whether AI-generative tools, such as ChatGPT, can help to improve students' English writing skills in university. Interviews were used to find out students and teachers' opinions towards using AI in writing. The results indicate that students find AI tools convenient for learning writing skills, but teachers are concerned that the feedback and examples provided by AI are too general and ambiguous. This study provides some interesting opinions from students and teachers about their experience using AI in learning and writing and helps us to understand more about how to use AI effectively in the education sector. Copyright ©2024 Online Learning Consortium.

Despite the widespread use of mobile digital devices such as iPads in teaching and learning, there is little research on the ways in which content teachers make use of the technological affordances of the iPad to achieve pedagogical goals in bilingual/multilingual classrooms. This article adopts translanguaging as an analytical perspective to explore how the use of the iPad extends the semiotic and spatial repertoires for enabling the English Medium Instruction (EMI) teacher to create a translanguaging space for supporting multilingual students' learning of new academic knowledge. The data for this article is based on a linguistic ethnographic project in an EMI mathematics classroom in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is used to analyse the classroom interactional data, triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interviews that are analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The article argues that the iPad provides opportunities for the EMI teacher to fully exploit the semiotic and spatial resources for creating a technology-mediated space in the classroom. Such a space in turn allows the teacher to accomplish content teaching and build a more engaging environment for learning. Copyright ©2024 SAGE Publications.

This qualitative study investigates how two dance teachers (one in Toronto and the other in Hong Kong) shifted issues of pedagogy and autonomy in virtual dance classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reveals that participants quickly adapt to new environments and utilize available technologies in both teaching and learning. The study shares insights and practical strategies for dance educators to adapt and apply in regular dance classes even after the pandemic. In addition to teachers' perspectives on virtual teaching, selected student works highlight how the shift of autonomy fosters creativity and boosts confidence. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

Online learning became a necessity in many places during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the case of Hong Kong SAR, the pandemic provided a unique opportunity to establish blended learning as a norm. The authors discuss the insights and challenges related to delivering mathematics lessons online in a secondary school during and after the pandemic. A three-year-long case study was conducted to examine the differences in perceptions between a teacher and his five students regarding online mathematics instruction during the suspension of traditional in-class lessons in 2020 and after the resumption of traditional instruction in 2023. The Social-Ecological Approach with domains of structure, agency, and cultural practice was applied in the study, which investigated the perceived benefits of blended learning for both the students and the teachers. Data was collected via interviews. The study explored technological challenges, curriculum adaptations, and the impact of parental support on blended learning. Looking ahead, leveraging motivators like easy access while mitigating distractors through disciplined strategies can optimize blended learning environments. The insights gained from this study provide valuable guidance on the effectiveness of instructional strategies and technological tools, highlighting the features of best practices for future blended learning approaches. Furthermore, the paper provides valuable information for policymakers, educators, and educational technology developers. Copyright ©2024 Indonesian Mathematical Society.

It is essential for second/foreign/additional language teachers to develop their digital competence in digital environments. This article explores language teacher development in digital technology integration in terms of exploration, communication, collaboration, and reflection (ECCR). It presents the results of a study that investigated how language teachers explore, communicate, collaborate, and reflect for technology-enhanced language teaching (TELT), how they approach ECCR, how much they engage with ECCR activities, and what support they need to improve their competence in TELT. Data were collected from an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with groups of in-service language teachers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Findings indicate that the teachers in both countries are engaged with various ECCR activities with different interests and competencies in their contexts. They enhance our understanding of language teacher development and provide implications for professional development with ECCR. Copyright ©2024 Online Learning Consortium.

Digital reading literacy has emerged as a pivotal factor contributing significantly to teenagers’ academic and future career successes. Few studies have focused on how ICT-related factors shape students’ digital reading literacy in non-English-speaking contexts. This study explored the impacts of ICT-related home and school factors on digital reading literacy, analyzing data from four non-English-speaking Asian countries and regions participating in PISA 2018, including Hong Kong, South Korea, Macau, and Taiwan. In addition, we compared the identified influential factors between these four countries and regions, as well as with previous studies, for a comprehensive understanding of ICT-related factors of digital reading. The Random Forest model was used to rank the importance of ICT-related factors and identify the top 10 most influential factors of digital reading. The most important ICT-related home factors were parents’ attitudes and participation in digital reading activities. Among ICT-related school factors, the time of ICT use in school, the subject that classes use ICT, and the number of computers were found to be negatively associated with students' digital reading literacy. However, the capacity of schools to use digital devices to improve learning and teaching was positively associated with students’ digital reading literacy. Copyright ©2024 Springer.

With the ability to provide feedback and assistance, humanoid educational robots have been proven effective in assisting students to overcome learning challenges and enhancing individual learning outcomes. However, the strength of humanoid robots in promoting social and emotional skills has not been well investigated. Socially supportive behaviour can contribute more to students’ learning engagement than knowledge transfer. This study focuses on the design of humanoid robots to engage students from functional and affective perspectives. To this end, a pilot test is conducted on 64 primary school students in Hong Kong, comprising a control group ( N  = 33) and an experimental group ( N  = 31). Questionnaires, observations, and language proficiency test are done to ensure the validity of the findings. The results show that the experimental group, which learned with the humanoid robots, significantly improved their behavioural engagement (+ 13.24%), emotional engagement (+ 13.14%), cognitive engagement (21.56%), and intrinsic motivation (12.07%). The impact of utilizing humanoid robots in education is elucidated through the lens of the self-determination theory (SDT), which pertains to students’ learning motivation and engagement. These findings can provide valuable insights into the development of more captivating humanoid robots for extensive learning purposes. Copyright ©2024 Springer.

English as a foreign language (EFL) students' use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that generate human-like text may enhance students' written work. However, the extent to which students use AI-generated text to complete a written composition and how AI-generated text influences the overall writing quality remain uncertain. 23 Hong Kong secondary school students wrote stories with AI-writing tools, integrating their own words and AI-generated text into the stories. We analyzed the basic structure, organization, and syntactic complexity of each story and its AI-generated text. Experts scored the quality of each story's content, language, and organization. By employing multiple linear regression and cluster analyses, we found that both the number of human words and the number of AI-generated words significantly contributed to writing scores. Furthermore, students could be classified into competent and less competent writers based on the variations of students' usage of AI-generated text compared to their peers. Cluster analyses revealed some benefit of AI-generated text in improving the scores of both high-scoring students' and low-scoring students' writing. We suggest differentiated, pedagogical strategies for EFL students to effectively use AI-writing tools and AI-generated text to complete writing tasks. Copyright ©2024 National Foreign Language Resource Center at University of Hawaii.

Since late November 2022, generative AI ChatGPT has drawn waves of attention in society, and its impacts certainly extend to the higher education setting. Although ChatGPT has not been officially released for registration in Hong Kong, the higher education setting has been responding differently. The article conducted a systematic review of local newspapers published between 1 December 2022 and 31 July 2023 to analyse how the eight public universities in Hong Kong responded. This article divided the timeline into three phases: procrastination, remediation, and adaptation. Recommendations are given to universities for making policies and management based on the findings, including making timely but temporary announcements at the university level and updating course outlines that explicitly stated to what extent GenAI can be used in each course. This study used Hong Kong to serves as a reference for universities that are still struggling with the usage of ChatGPT and GenAI technologies in the restricted access areas. Copyright ©2024 Springer.