In the last two years, the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has been actively promoting the use of IT in schools. Virtually every school in the region is now well aware of the implications of these government initiatives and has embarked on the path toward integration of new learning technologies in the classroom. While many teachers may already be well down the track toward use of IT in teaching and learning, the impetus of government initiatives has meant that, all teachers now need to have clearer notions and directions about how to make the transition. Teachers need a strong foundation on which to build their skills toward modifying their teaching strategies to realize the potential of emerging technologies in enhancing student learning outcomes. Teachers themselves need to be willing to change. In the Hong Kong context it would appear that several things would have to occur before schools are able to mount any meaningful use of IT and where teachers are then able to integrate use of IT in their daily teaching and learning activities. It is with this focus that this paper will address some of the broad issues related to change in schools associated with the use of IT and attempt to provide some suggestions based on research findings and worldwide experience.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

This colloquium addresses the issue of the effectiveness of content teaching and learning through English in Hong Kong secondary schools in the context of the current moves to change the eligibility of schools to adopt English as their medium of instruction. It brings together some recent classroom-based research and development on teaching and learning through English in Hong Kong secondary schools in order to promote debate as to how this can be improved. Cummins will present an overview of the value of integrating second language and content learning. Kong and Hoare will focus on the use of English by teachers and students in the local English medium classrooms, based on data drawn from two studies on teacher explanations and student writing. Man will discuss some adaption issues of Secondary 1 English medium students switching from Chinese medium primary schools and will examine some support measures for their content learning. Walker will report on some of the difficulties students face using English for content learning in S4 and the role of an enrichment programme in supporting them. The colloquium will include an extended time for discussion on ways forward in English medium teaching and learning.

In the Hong Kong Institute of Education (abbr. HKIEd), a vast amount of lesson plans for primary and secondary teaching practices are prepared by our pre-service teachers. These valuable documents are being wasted each year. One reason for this is that there are lack of formal mechanism to keep them. The other reason is that the non-standardization of these electronic documents prevents an effective exchange and retrieval of their contents. In this paper, a formal markup language for lesson plans is proposed and developed using XML. The formalization for the various components of lesson plans helps to foster a non-ambiguous data model. Using XML technology, not only we can relevantly query the lesson plans, we can display their contents in a variety of formats and styles using web-based technologies such as XSL and XSLT.

The Hong Kong government's language policy seeks to ensure that its citizens are trilingual (in Cantonese, Putonghua and English) and biliterate (in Chinese and English). The Singapore government also seeks to ensure that the population is biliterate in English and the speaker's L1. As most of the population is ethnically Chinese, this means that the Singaporean education system is concerned to ensure that people emerge biliterate in Chinese and English. The Chinese government, while insisting that Putonghua remain the medium of instruction in most contexts, is also encouraging the acquisition of literacy in English, and English has recently been introduced as a subject in all primary schools. This talk will consider the cognitive challenges involved in the acquisition of literacy in both Chinese and English and discuss some of the results of the current policies. The talk will include suggestions for ways of helping students acquire literacy in both Chinese and English.

The Education and Manpower Bureau of the Hong Kong Government has promoted 'Learning to Learn' as a crucial feature of student-centred curriculum and the educational reforms over the passed decade have been directed towards this goal. Recently, information literacy, described as: the ability to master the processes of becoming informed, was identified as the missing ingredient in the reform. Interest in information literacy grew out of a realization that the application of modern information and communication technology and related shifts in curriculum integration and a shift away from textbooks and examinations, was not sufficient to deliver learning to learn.