1517-creating-holistic-technology-enhanced-learning-experiences

EDITORIAL
presentation, and spreadsheets software applications. She stresses that the
affordance of the technological tools is the most important element to be
considered – how technology could help students learn better. She uses Blogs to
disseminate information regarding her mathematics lesson to students and their
parents, collates freely available Internet web resources to be put on the Blogs for
students to get more information or play educational mathematical games to
reinforce what have been taught in her lessons. She also uses the commonly
available presentation software to engage students in their model drawing for
mathematic problem-solving sums and systematically documents how she has
conducted her lessons. She then attempts to objectively evaluate the impacts of her
teaching on her students’ acquisition of mathematical concepts and skills.
In Chapter 4, Wales and Melwani describe how they have designed a series of
English language lessons incorporating drama and digital storytelling. Drama and
digital storytelling are two pedagogies that are recognised for being engaging,
participatory and immersive in nature. Over a period of three weeks, 32 Primary 4
students explored endangered species (e.g., the turtles) through drama and
presented their findings in multiple narratives, including digital stories. The
objective for this series of lessons is to know how well the students have come to
understand the topic of study and develop their technical writing skills for their
reports. In addition, it also evaluates the effectiveness of drama in developing the
students’ understanding of the issues from different perspectives as well as builds
empathy of the endangered species and cultivates better understanding of
conservation. The students were found to be very engaged with the lessons. The
drama activities provided students with opportunities to develop their oral skills
and to embody different points of view. ICT provided students opportunities to
categorise, code and synthesise information. The authors also found that the
students’ third person writing skills had developed significantly.
In Chapter 5, Yusoff, Yu and Chang use ‘concept cartoon’ as a knowledge
building tool for the learning of science. This study uses a social constructivist’s
approach and allows students to construct their knowledge collaboratively with
their peers. The authors observed that there was higher level of motivation in the
learning of science among students, an increase in students’ participation and a
higher participation rate from less vocal students. The authors also reflected that
more efforts and considerations would be required to facilitate (or explicitly teach)
students’ ability to build on their peer’s ideas. Useful teaching points were
recommended by the authors to better carry out lessons using technology from a
social constructivist approach.
In Chapter 6, Lee and Ho use animated digital story to engage students in the
learning of English. Students retell a fable by creating simple frame-by-frame
animation as a form of digital storytelling through the integration of English
language, art and music. Lee and Ho use multimodality and semiotics theoretical
perspectives in their analysis of students’ use of animated digital storytelling. The
authors reflect that due to the increasing affordances offered by technologies, the
conventional notion of being able to listen, read, speak and write would not be
adequate for students to function in the new media age. They argue that the
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