In recent times the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has been very active in promoting the use of information technology (IT,) in schools. in light of (he urgent need to, mount extensive and comprehensive training programs for teachers, this paper will present some recent findings of teacher responses obtained from a staff development activity conducted for primary school teachers. Teacher use of IT, teacher perceptions related 10 issues of IT infrastructure and support, as well as leadership issues in schools will be discussed. The findings reveal how teachers currently view their capability to cope in light of government initiatives to encourage teachers to make effective use of IT. The three key elements of teachers ‘perceptions were (1) lack of time to explore and experiment: (2) need for personalized/customized on-site training with on-going support; and (3,) easy access to facilities. Despite the constraints teachers and principals were very supportive of government initiatives and were keen to he proactive in meeting this challenge.

Many students have difficulties in the learning of elementary statistics because they think the concepts are abstract. Besides traditional classroom instruction, teachers can use the World Wide Web (WWW) technology to enhance the teaching and learning of statistics. In this paper, the author wants to discuss how the WWW technology can:- serve as a teaching resource; elaborate on the statistical concepts; promote interactive learning; be available for individual learning; and prepare students for the world of learning and work in an information age.

To solve the problem faced by most of the students in Hong Kong who conduct recipe learning, we would like to enhance their understanding by web-based interactive multimedia learning tools. Nevertheless, we find that the existing packages are limited in functionality and user-friendliness. Worst of all, very few of them are Internet-based. Therefore, we develop our own Internet tools, including two-dimensional geometric and vector plotters, a time evolution three-dimensional plotter and an Internet mathematical equation editor. All these tools have the following features: they are &ser-friendly, interactive, dynamic, extendible and Internet based. Hence, they are very suitable to be utilized as teaching tools. A research has been conducted to test their effectiveness. The result shows that students welcome the use of Internet-based learning tools and achieve better understanding after using them. This is of course very rewarding and, thus, we are highly motivated to develop more tools of this kind to supplement the normal lecturing of d4fferent subjects. More detailed information can be found at http://vied.eee.hku.hk.

For nearly 30 intakes over 15 years, Charles Sturt University has delivered a distance education course which operates with Australian and, for the last 6 years, Hong Kong students. Since the course has made extensive use of computer based materials as well as computer mediated communication over that time, some valuable lessons have been learnt. While some of these have to do with institutional and management issues, many are about the differences between theory and practice.
The use of computer mediated communication increases workload rather than relieving it as some might suggest. While in some respects, students may feel that they are getting a better service with electronic communications and materials, there is also a severe penalty to be paid.
On balance, this situation favours the use of such technologies but not sufficiently to result in enthusiastic adoption. A key area involves the examination of how effectively the static and dynamic resources are attuned to the educational needs of the students. Activities which force a synchronisation are poorly received compared to ones which operate asynchronously. Similarly, electronic resources which simply replace existing printed material without a large amount of 'value adding', have also been found to be of dubious value.

The significant increase in recent years in the popularity of the internet, particularly the World Wide Web, has obvious implications for the school sector. Beyond expertise in their own subject areas, teachers now need to become aware of how they may become more proficient users of this new form of electronic media which can help them better achieve their pedagogical aims and objectives. Through their participation in the School Teachers' Website Management Programme (ST- WMP), teachers are learning how to perform all the tasks related to web design and development. This staff development programme for secondary school teachers consists of workshops and hands-on practice in building and maintaining a website dedicated to publishing information about web-related aspects of teaching and learning.
This paper reports on our experience with offering this special programme to secondary school teachers in Hong Kong and also reports on the findings of a survey conducted among participants concerning their experience with using the internet for teaching and learning in their schools.

The school-based training on Internet Access is one f the teacher enablement courses in the Hong Kong Cyber Campus project. This paper will discuss the feedback from teachers attending the course, describe our observations and make some course-related recommendations.