There is a song at the beginning of the musical, West Side Story, where the character Tony sings that "something's coming, something good." The song is an anthem of optimism, brimming with promise. This paper is about the long-held promise of information and communication technology (ICT) to transform teaching and learning, to modernise…

Much of the current focus on maximizing the potential of ICT to enhance teaching and learning is on learning tasks rather than the technology. These learning tasks increasingly employ a constructivist, problem-based methodology especially one based around authentic learning. The problem-based nature of history provides fertile ground for this…

This article is an evaluation of the use of Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) as a teaching and learning medium from the perspectives of students in Years 5 and 7 at Firbank Grammar School, in Victoria. It replicates a study undertaken in the United Kingdom by Wall, Higgins and Smith (2005). Fifty-six Year 5 students and 82 Year 7 students at the…

Seeking understandings of the relationships children have with electronic environments is needed in order to continue to develop our understandings of what children are doing in those environments and why. This paper looks at the musical compositions of children in an electronic environment and attempts to demonstrate how those compositions are as…

Multimedia is one of the biggest buzzwords around in education in this age of computer technology. Multimedia is short for multiple media and simply means using computers to bring together words, photographs, sounds, animations and video. In this article, the author talks about multimedia presentations as a powerful education learning tool. It is…

This paper reports how digital technologies can be successfully incorporated into traditional teaching programmes to support the learning of a new generation of learners. It describes the introduction of an innovative learning venture with preservice teachers. A web-based platform called Lessonlab was piloted with four cohorts of preservice…

The introduction of an open-ended MicroWorlds based assignment in a pre-service teaching degree produced interesting results. Students engaged with the task at very high levels and produced work of high quality; so much so that marking trends were reversed. This paper explores the design and implementation of the task and how for many students it…