Recent developments in handheld telephony have given rise to the ‘mobile internet' - a range of technologies, from multimedia-messaging to access of the internet through handheld devices. These trends have been accompanied by the increasing consumerization of the mobile phone. Many students today have access to a tool, which allows them to connect to potentially anyone else, regardless of spatial co-location. This paper describes a study which was carried out in the early months of 2004, focusing on how the social software of the mobile internet, such as text- and picture-messaging, is used by adolescents in the process of constructing negotiated and shared understandings of unfamiliar environments in which they may find themselves. Students were presented with opportunities to collaboratively explore and navigate unfamiliar environments using the technologies of the mobile internet, as well as to engage in debate, and used multimedia evidence recorded in the field to defend their positions both to peers in the field and subsequently in the classroom.

"This progress report relates to the third study in the DCL suite - the analysis of student artefacts collected during the unit of school work being observed. It is focused on three key issues relating to CRPP's research mission in general and to the DCL project's overall aim: 1. The need for a more systematic attention to epistemological issues in pedagogical research, a concern with nature of knowledge as it is enacted, conveyed and built in school work and through curriculum and assessment materials. 2. The need expressed by both researchers and professionals for more systematic attention to the ways in which new communication and representational technologies are implying more sophisticated and diverse forms of multimodal representation. 3. The need for the teachers to take an open-textured task design perspective towards the planning and execution of the lesson activities and setting and marking of student work."-- [p. 1-2].

"This project is a case study of building communities of practice (CoPs) among Heads of Departments of Information Technology ((HOD(IT)s) in Singapore schools. As part of the second MasterPlan for Information Technologies in Schools initiated in 2002, there has been a stated goal to employ the CoP approach as a key strategic initiative to develop a more integrated "IT across the curriculum" approach in schools. As part of the same plan it was hoped that there would be a slowing changing pedagogical model that the learning environment might become more learner-centred through the effective integration of the technology. "-- [p. 1].

This paper reports the findings of an online survey aimed at exploring the use of dataloggers in learning inquiry science and project work in secondary schools and junior colleges. It examines the type of activities which teachers conduct using dataloggers, the support structures they deem necessary and the difficulties they faced. Out of the 593 Heads of Department (Science) and science teachers who responded to the online questionnaire survey, 394 (67%) have used dataloggers in the last 2 years, mainly in demonstrations and set experiments. The three most important support structures that were listed by the respondents included: supportive laboratory technicians who were able to use dataloggers, training on the use of dataloggers, and instructional material about how to use dataloggers in the curriculum. The difficulties which deterred the respondents from using dataloggers included the difficulty and time taken to set up the datalogging equipment and activities, insufficient computer workstations, and the mishandling of equipment by students. Recommendations about facilitating the use of dataloggers in school include the setting up of laboratories dedicated for datalogging activities, having courses on datalogging for teachers and laboratory technicians, and the preparing curricular materials on datalogging.

This paper reports the findings of a national survey on the use of dataloggers in secondary schools (Grades 7-10) and junior colleges (Grades 11-12). In particular, it explores the types of learning activities that teachers conduct using dataloggers, the support structures they deem necessary, and the difficulties they face. Out of the 593 respondents, 394 (67%) had used dataloggers in the last two years, mainly in demonstrations and set experiments. The three most important support structures included: supportive laboratory technicians, training on the use of dataloggers, and instructional material on how to use dataloggers within the curriculum. The difficulties which deterred the respondents from using dataloggers included the logistics and time taken to set up datalogging equipment and activities, insufficient numbers of computer workstations, and the mishandling of equipment by students leading to equipment malfunctions. To expand the use of dataloggers in school, the respondents suggest that dedicated laboratories be set up for datalogging activities, more curricular material to support datalogging be prepared, more familiarisation courses be run for teachers and laboratory technicians and, in particular, how dataloggers fit within an inquiry science learning approach.

Datalogging has the potential to facilitate and extend opportunities for inquiry-based science by providing data and different modalities of representation with minimum effort. The real-time data display provides an immediate link between an experiment and its graphical representation, enabling students to visualize the course of the experiment. It also frees experimentation from time constraints as data can be collected over days, and relieves students from tabulating data and drawing graphs by hand, allowing them to concentrate on the interpretation of data. This paper describes some aspects of a national survey of 593 science teachers on the use of datalogging in Singapore secondary schools (Grades 7-10) and junior colleges (Grades 11-12), interviews of three Science Heads of Department, and classroom observations of datalogging activities. The results suggest that the unique affordances of datalogging are not being fully realised in science learning because teachers generally lack the vision for how dataloggers can be used to enhance the student learning experience in inquiry-based science.

For many years learning management systems have been focused on providing resources for students. More recently, the growth of digital repositories has provided resources that can be tagged and searched independently of a course structure. G-portal provides resources specifically tagged for geographical learning tasks and provides a project space in which students can collaborate, create resources and share these resources amongst themselves. This paper reviews the research issues surrounding G-portal using activity theory as a framework and defines a research agenda based on the capabilities of G-portal. In particular, issues of information organisation, issues of usability, search strategies and retrieval techniques, multimodality of representation, transduction of information and representation of geographic and spatial information will be examined. The research agenda focuses on three areas: information organisation and representation; the capabilities of the G-Portal application and its ability to integrate and retrieve information and geographical task; and the ease with which students are able to undertake and complete learning tasks about geographical phenomena.

In recent years increasing emphasis has been placed on the appropriate use of the Internet in schools. However pervasive use of Internet technology alone does not guarantee positive gains in pedagogical strategies, nor does it automatically translate into meaningful learning. Inefficient, haphazard, and disorganized searching for information results in students either becoming disorientated or retrieving information from unreliable sources. Often this problem has become further compounded due to most Internet-based student activities being poorly guided and students are left on their own to locate and sift relevant information. This paper discusses the findings of a major study conducted in Singapore to assess student Internet literacy skills and practices. The findings provided the basis for developing a framework of heuristics on which to design and teach Internet-based multidisciplinary, inquiry lessons. This framework enables teachers to build a rich repertoire of cognitive reasoning, research and problem solving skills amongst students.

"Mathematical problem solving (MPS) is at the centre of the Singapore Mathematics programme's framework. How has the programme been integrated into the school system? This study investigates three aspects: teachers' classroom practices, students' problem-solving heuristics, and students' metacognitive behaviours in paired problem solving. "-- [p. 1] of executive summary.

To support participant teachers extend their teaching of mathematics problem solving heuristics, we explore the use of a digital repository which comprises a video component, a discussion forum and a databank of classroom resource. The video component consists of extracts from teachers’ classroom practices and workshops which they had attended. The discussion forum is set up partly based on the video extracts and partly on issues raised by the participants. The databank of classroom resources comprises mainly ‘classroom-ready’ mathematical problems. This article looks at some considerations that went into the design of the repository, and concludes with a discussion on related issues of building up and continuing the repository.

This paper describes G-Portal, a geospatial digital library of geographical assets, providing an interactive platform to engage students in active manipulation and analysis of information resources and collaborative learning activities. Using a G-Portal application in which students conducted a field study of an environmental problem of beach erosion and sea level rise, we describe a pilot study to evaluate usefulness and usability issues to support the learning of geographical concepts, and in turn teaching.

This paper discusses the issue of fostering or building learning communities among heads of department (HoD) in IT in Singapore schools. A preliminary study was conducted among 17 HoDs anchoring on the issues of IT MasterPlan II (MP2) in Singapore. The study reveals the issues of concern for these HoD ITs vis-à-vis the impending need to implement the pedagogically inclined stance of MP2. This paper presents a framework of an evolving community of practitioners (CoP) along a simulation, participation, and codetermined interactions continuum. Simulation, participation, and co-determined interactions are three models of learning, which describe how learners are brought through a scaffolded process within a community experience.

Unlike learning management systems that allow the instructor to organize resources in a predetermined structure which prescribes a fixed learning strategy, G-portal was developed to provide digital assets that will are used by students to solve an authentic problem based on real world resources. In contrast to learning management systems (LMS) that allow the teacher to organize resources in some predetermined structure which then prescribes a fixed learning strategy, digital libraries such as the G-portal provide users the opportunity to take control of their choice of resources, ways of representing and using these resources, creating new resources and even developing their own learning strategies. The G-portal developmental project was initiated as an attempt to improve on the existing capabilities of digital repositories and the move into multimodal representations, in that it hosts In order to effectively deploy the G-portal at local schools and test the effectiveness of the various capabilities of G-portal and the associated learning styles, a project was conducted to develop digital assets and to examine the usability and capabilities of the G-portal.

Students learn Geographical concepts more effectively if they can identify and generalize about where different resources or activities are spatially located and when they associate certain patterns and processes with geographical changes. Digital libraries can be used to support web-based student-centred inquiry as a mode of learning Geography. This study explores the affordances of a geographical digital repository (the G-Portal) which organizes information around problem tasks. Two phases of the project were to build a digital library for Geographical assets and to develop a place-name assignment algorithm which automatically determines the names of places embedded in web pages referenced by these assets so as to augment them with the appropriate location semantics. This G-Portal digital library serves an active role in collaborative learning activities in which students conduct a virtual field study of an environmental problem, within a geospatial context – in this case, beach erosion and sea level rise. GPortal also provides manipulation and analytical tools that can operate on the information retrieved.

"This project was part of a suite of studies that aimed to describe and intervene in information and communication technology (ICT)-oriented learning activities at the lower high-school level. The study focused on student performance in Web search tasks that could be used to extend class work and add real-world contexts to learning."-- [p. 1] of executive summary.

The personalized project space is an important feature in G-Portal that supports individual and group learning activities. Within such a space, its owner can create, delete, and organize metadata referencing learning objects on the Web. Browsing and querying are among the functions provided to access the metadata. In addition, new schemas can be added to accommodate metadata of diverse attribute sets. Users can also easily share metadata across different projects using a “copy-and-paste” approach. Finally, a viewer to support offline viewing of personalized project content is also provided.

Singapore mathematics syllabuses identify eleven heuristics which are applicable to problem solving at the upper primary level (MOE, 2001a), and thirteen heuristics at lower secondary level (MOE, 2001b). This paper discusses some of the general characteristics of problem solving heuristics. This paper will also examines these heuristics, their functions and roles in mathematical problem solving and the relationships they have with each other. According to their different characteristics, how and when they can be used in mathematical problem solving, they can be classified into four categories: “representation heuristics”, “simplification heuristics”, “pathway heuristics”, and “generic heuristics”. Together they describe the process of mathematical problem solving.