Hua-Lin Tsai

Collaborative Online Network and Cultural Exchange Project

This study starts with the idea of dealing with digital learning and the information explosion. English plays a major role in world communication. All trade areas as well as other diversified fields emphasize English proficiency. Students enhance their global vision via English comprehension. Therefore, students’ interactions with their peers in other nations through digital multimedia on the web is a very important skill in this digital era. This project attempts to understand course material while interacting through online web learning. It stimulates students’ cultural experiences and expands their learning fields. The project provides a problem solving model and encourages students to try to solve problems by themselves. It recruits high school and primary school students to make international contacts. Four hundred teams of parents, teachers, and students are involved in a web platform to discuss international issues. The topics can be related to natural resources, people and society, and human and self-renunciation, and there are many more topics for multicultural learning. The project also intends to do cross-cultural learning exchanges and experience sharing, and will submit findings to related educational administrators and web learners for further reference.

Effects of the Orff Music Teaching Method on Creative Thinking Abilities

This study starts with the area of arts and humanities, integrates sentiment and rationality, and emphasizes fostering the abilities of creative thinking. Quasi-experimental research was adopted to examine the effects of the Orff music teaching method on creative thinking abilities, and the method was implemented on the experimental group. The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking was used for the pre-test and post-test, and it was found after analyzing the covariance data that the Orff music teaching method has positive influences on children’s creative thinking abilities. The fluency, flexibility, and originality of their creative thinking increased significantly. There are suggestions for future research.

A Study of the Project on Mobile Devices in Education

This study intends to investigate the Personal Handyphone System (PHS) phone and its application in an elementary school. The interview process focused on the director who managed the planning for the system from an experimental elementary school located in Kaohsiung County, southern Taiwan. She joined of the whole digital experimental project and observed interactions between the parents and their own children in that specific elementary school. In the experimental period, the director observed each parent using a PHS phone for message transmission and mobile net communication, and the parents discussed and shared feelings with the teacher and other parents by using a PHS phone. The research summarizes the director’s ideas and provides references, opinions, and information to instruction designers and mobile learning directors for developing further innovative instruction.

The Solutions of Mobile Technology for Primary School

It is very important to understand the mobile technology content in order to bring up the new century students’ technology equipment, as it is the headstone of technology development. The mobile technology includes handle mobile devices, digital transmission modes, mobile information software and so on. The mobile technology realized the perpetual contact, the network tools of teenagers’ social intercourse. In the science and technology curriculum, the students had to answer questions such as: What is mobile technology? How do these things execute? What kinds of value and belief effect influenced the mobile technology? What kind of ideas fostered the mobile technology? How did we put these ideas into practice? What is the interaction between mobile technology and sociality? What is very important, is to promote the students’ adaptation to the new environment via technology instruction. The mobile technology content integrated into instruction could be applied to instructional strategies of dissemination, facilitation, inside and outside collaboration, apprenticeship, generative development and so on. Therefore, perplexities and countermeasures that have risen from theory exploration and experience of teaching can be shown in this chapter. The result will provide a resource for administrations and teaching.