Hong Kong

Early in the 1990s, local mathematics educators were aware of the potential impact of ICT in teaching and learning. Use of individual software for mathematics application or learning was introduced in some teacher training programs and found in limited teachers’ sharing within professional bodies. However, putting the emerging educational technology on trials in normal mathematics classrooms was far from easy. One practical reason then was that computers were not available in schools for learning of subjects other than computer studies. More fundamentally, the central mathematics curriculum, which was designed in the 1980s, did not incorporate any use of technology except perhaps scientific calculators.

Major breakthrough in the general awareness of educational technology among mathematics teachers occurred at the turn of century when tremendous resources were put on the building of ICT infrastructure in schools and the long-awaited new mathematics curriculum was ready. It was the time when the newly established HKSAR government was determined to transform the educational setting in order to meet the needs of a technological society. A five-year ICT education strategy was announced in the first policy address of the Chief Executive of HKSAR (Tung, 1997). It was particularly specified that the target was “to have teaching in at least 25% of the curriculum supported through IT” within five years (para. 47).

The five-year strategy was launched amid a number of curriculum initiatives, most of which inevitably exerted their influences on one another, to varying degrees though. Mathematics itself constitutes one of the Key Learning Areas and thus has attracted considerable attention. Listed below are a few selected documents issued by the Curriculum Development Council (CDC), HKSAR:

1999	Syllabuses for Secondary Schools: Mathematics (Secondary 1–5)
2000a	Learning to Learn: Key Learning Area – Mathematics Education (Consultation Document)
2000b	Report on Holistic Review of the Mathematics Curriculum
2000c	Mathematics Curriculum Guide (P1–P6)
2001	Learning to Learn: Life-long Learning and Whole-person Development

There are some common threads running through these recently published curriculum documents with regard to ICT usage in the mathematics curriculum, especially but not exclusively that at secondary level. ‘Learning to Learn’ is at the core of the major curriculum reform (cf. CDC, 2000a, 2001) in which a set of so-called generic skills is underscored and claimed to be fundamental in helping students to acquire, construct, and to apply knowledge. Unsurprisingly, the capacity “to seek, absorb, analyse, manage and present information critically and intelligently in an information age and a digitised world”, coined as “information technology skill,” is on the list (CDC, 2001, p.24). So, in the case of mathematics education, as reflected in the aims and objectives of the school curriculum – both secondary and primary (cf. CDC, 1999, 2000c), the processes of mathematical investigation and problem solving are one of the curricular emphases. This calls for more explorations which are now widely accepted to be well facilitated by ICT.

Considerations of ICT are included in each of the above documents. The main thrust of all such recommendations may be best summarized by a point made by CDC (2001) on the general curriculum reform: “Information technology for interactive learning” is recommended as one of the key tasks for teachers to help developing students’ independent learning capacity in their pursuit of life-long and life-wide learning. Noteworthy is the idea of interactive use of ICT-supported teaching/learning materials. Reading in detail the “exemplars of implementation in mathematics education” in the curricular documents, we notice the frequent occurrence of such words as “explore”, “investigate”, and “obtain information from the Internet” (e.g. CDC, 2000a, pp.45-47). ICT is beneficial to developing an independent learner who is motivated and inquisitive enough to actively explore the world and construct his/her own knowledge. Such a prominent role of ICT in facilitating both mathematics teachers and students is also heeded by the Ad hoc Committee on Holistic Review of the Mathematics Curriculum: “IT has become a fact of life and we have enjoyed many benefits from the advent of information and communication technology” (CDC, 2000b, p.45). In particular, it continues with a more detailed description of the potential strengths of ICT:

(a)	IT can enhance and extend mathematics learning experience, and encourage active student participation in exploratory and investigative activities.
(b)	IT, when used as a tool, can support, supplement and extend teaching and learning activities, such as:
	• exercises and tutorial,
	• charting and graphical analysis,
	• simulation and modeling,
	• information retrieval and handling, and
	• data processing.
(c)	IT may lead to new teaching strategies and practices in classrooms such as providing students with an interactive learning environment for contextual and situation learning.
	(CDC, 2000b, pp.45-46)