The role of technology has exponentially grown in education, especially with the school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries like Singapore and Scotland have historically invested in educational technology and have successfully created Smart Nations and citizens. This book is based on comparative research conducted between school education systems in Scotland and Singapore. It attempts to identify the key characteristics to determine the level of embeddedness of digital technologies within the education systems of the respective countries. The study further compares the use of digital technologies as an educational response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The book gets interesting with the in-depth findings from each of the systems. During these unprecedented times, when home-based learning (HBL) using technology is inevitable, the findings of the study are highly relevant and provide insights on HBL, digital technologies, and schooling in these countries. Going forward, the role of digital technologies in education will substantially grow. The recommendations provided in this book can only facilitate improving the process/level of embedding digital technology in teaching and learning across the school systems.

This book presents the status quo of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Education, with a focus on China and the 17 Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs), including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia (the “17+1” cooperation mechanism, as an incubator for pragmatic trans-regions cooperation platform, created by China and the 17 CEECs). With recent advances in ICT in China and the CEECs, it has assumed increasingly important roles in education, including the improvement of the quality of teaching and learning, as well as the promotion of equity in education. The significant contribution of ICT in education is an enabler to achieving the goals of the “17+1 cooperation” mechanism between China and the CEECs, which has attracted considerable attention worldwide, given fresh impetus to cooperation between the two parties, and opened a new chapter in China-CEEC cooperation. The contributors, all of whom hail from these 18 countries, describe the state-of-the-art of ICT in education in their respective country, and focus on three major aspects, namely: the country profile, general status of education development, and ICT in education. In turn, leading experts in educational informatization research compare the situations in different countries. Taken together, the papers offer valuable insights for policymakers and educators on how to integrate ICT into educational processes, and on inter-regional cooperation with regard to ICT in education.

This fourth volume in the Current Perspectives on School/University/Community Research series brings together the perspectives of authors who are deeply committed to the integration of digital technology with teaching and learning. Authors were invited to discuss either a completed project, a work-in-progress, or a theoretical approach which aligned with one of the trends highlighted by the New Media Consortium’s NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2017 K-12 Edition, or to consider how the confluence of interest and action (Thompson, Martinez, Clinton, & Díaz, 2017) among school-university-community collaborative partners in the digital technology in education space resulted in improved outcomes for all—where “all” is broadly conceived and consists of the primary beneficiaries (the students) as well as the providers of the educational opportunities and various subsets of the community in which the integrative endeavors are enacted. The chapters in this volume are grouped into four sections: Section 1 includes two chapters that focus on computational thinking/coding in the arts (music and visual arts); Section 2 includes three chapters that focus on the instructor in the classroom, preservice teacher preparation, and pedagogy; Section 3 includes four chapters that focus on building the academic proficiency of students; and Section 4 includes two chapters that focus on the design and benefits of school-university-community collaboration.