COVID-19, the most severe global pandemic since the Spanish flu that followed World War I, threatens nearly every country, from global powers to developing nations. This threat presents a concurrent challenge for educational systems. With schools closed during the pandemic, students and teachers have had to stay at home worldwide. This shift has…

In this paper we examine how two groups of middle school students arrive at shared understandings of and solutions to mathematical problems. Our data consists of logs of student participation in the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) system as they work on math problems. The project supports interaction both through chat and through a virtual whiteboard. We…

Tangible technologies and shared interfaces create new paradigms for mediating collaboration through dynamic, synchronous environments, where action is as important as speech for participating and contributing to the activity. However, interaction with shared interfaces has been shown to be inherently susceptible to peer interference, potentially…

Learning science requires the understanding of concepts and formal relationships, processes that--in themselves--have been proved to be difficult for students as they seem to encounter substantial problems with most of the inquiry-learning processes in which they engage. Models in inquiry-based learning have been considered as powerful…

This study explores how collaborative inquiry learning can be supported with multiple scaffolding agents in a real-life field trip context. In practice, a mobile peer-to-peer messaging tool provided meta-cognitive and procedural support, while tutors and a nature guide provided more dynamic scaffolding in order to support argumentative discussions…

This exploratory study analyzes how students use different communication modes to share information, negotiate meaning and construct knowledge in the process of doing a group learning activity in a Primary Grade 5 blended learning environment in Singapore. Small groups of students interacted face-to-face over a computer-mediated communication…

"Paper Scribbles" (PS) consisting of markers, vanguard sheets and 3M "Post-It" notes, is a pedagogical tool to harness collective intelligence of groups for collaborative learning in the classroom. Borrowing the key features of PS and yet avoiding some of their physical limitations, a computer-based tool called "Group…

Schools generally have been unable to keep up with the rapid technical changes in modern society. As a result, primary school age children worldwide are becoming self-taught independent e-learners and the gap between what they know and are able to do exceeds the learning outcomes for their schools' ICT (information communication technology)…

Readers will find several papers that address high-level issues in the use of technology in education, for example architecture and design frameworks for building online education materials or tools. Several other chapters report novel approaches to intelligent tutors or adaptive systems in educational settings. A number of chapters consider many…

Despite improvements in educational indicators, such as enrolment, significant challenges remain with regard to the delivery of quality education in developing countries, particularly in rural and remote regions. In the attempt to find viable solutions to these challenges, much hope has been placed in new information and communication technologies…