This paper describes the development of a digital portfolio retrieval system entitled Portfolio Retrieval for Investigating Useful Material (PRIUM) which reflects keyword similarity. PRIUM was used as an information retrieval tool for an Information Communication Technology (ICT) education class at a primary school. The findings are that elementary school students who used PRIUM could find electronic portfolios they wanted quickly, because PRIUM lessens the need for seeing electronic portfolios they didn't want. In addition, it is clear that electronic portfolios which were made by prior students provide students with useful information even when such electronic portfolios are provided as teaching materials without relying on retrieval systems.

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In order to examine if the Internet use outside classes can improve children's skill to practically use information and its sub-skills, a three-wave panel study with junior high school students was conducted at half-year intervals. The result of structural equation modeling analyses for the data of 539 students indicated virtually no short-term effects, which arose in half-year intervals. However, some long-term effects of Internet use, especially web-page development and e-mail use, which arose in a year, were often indicated. These suggest that the effects of Internet use can be detected a certain period after the Internet use. The result of this study also showed the effect of Internet use on the skill of creation and the effect of web-page development on the skill to practically use information, which had not been clearly detected in previous research.

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This paper describes an assessment tool to visualize the communication among learners on electronic forums. The authors have developed the software which clarifies the relationship between topic keywords and each learner with Correspondence Analysis. Thus the software called "i-Bee" (Bulletin board Enrollee Envisioner) represents a map between topic parts and students' commitments in the learning community. In this paper, the authors examine effectiveness of the software through an experimental study in a course at a university. The results show that i-Bee promotes students to grasp their commitments in the discussion or transition of their commitments. This promotes students to access messages which they do not care, and to reflect and review their commitments.

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In recent years, the Japanese-language proficiency of university students has been conspicuously deteriorating. Given this situation, we have provided our students with some methods on how to improve their command of Japanese. After the lessons, our students have to contribute their letters on daily life or current topics to a newspaper to check the attainment of their proficiency. We have accumulated text files of their letters for three years. Our goal in this study is to statistically analyze the characteristics of our students' letters in order to take full advantage of the result of analysis in our class on Japanese proficiency. We calculated rhetorical features such as sentence length, Yule's K, and so on by using a Japanese essay scoring system named JESS and then analyzed the result statistically. The analysis indicated there was a significant difference in sentence length and vocabulary diversity between our students' letters and the letters reported in the newspaper. Based on the findings, we are going to provide our students with more modified materials for Japanese learning.

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Our research group developed a digital textbook of the language for the juvenile students who have special needs. The on-site teacher and the university instructors to whom the method of development is engaged in special needs education with the contents creation contractor constituted a consortium. The contents creation contractors developed the digital textbook for the opinion of an on-site teacher to reference. The on-site teacher used the developed digital textbook by the lesson, and examined the improving point in the conference. Based on the result, the contents creation contractor added the improving point further. There are 14 kinds of teaching materials in the developed digital textbook, and 64 screen numbers, 124 illustrations (a photograph is also included), 97 kinds of animation, 97 PDF files, 59 kinds of music (a sound, sound effect, etc.), and the composition work program 1 are included in it. Thirty-two on-site teachers who were not engaged in development performed the third person evaluation of a digital textbook. There was no statistically significant difference in evaluation with the on-site teacher who developed.

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Demand for international distance education with universities across the globe has been gaining its importance in recent years. The implementation of such education requires mutual needs and benefits as well as manageable burdens. Under such circumstances, this study proposed a "module exchange system" as a means to satisfy the requirements. This system is different from the conventional joint distance education in that the system makes it possible to both parties to receive and send the only necessary classes. The two universities, the Faculty of Education, Gifu University and the Faculty of Arts, the University of Sydney have exchanged four classes in the past two years, which verified the practicability of international distance education based on the "module exchange system". Although no serious problems in terms of contents and technical systems were identified, the two-year experiment manifested several points for improvement. First, the system in which the sender and the receiver of the class do not necessarily coincide makes it crucial to achieve mutual understanding and cooperation within the respective organization. Second, the participating students should be fully informed how the module class fits into their regular course. Third, the students should be given teaching materials such as handouts in advance so that they are well prepared for the delivered class.

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In this study, we constructed a scale for measuring "the ability of practical use of information", which was a primary purpose of information education, and conducted on-site surveys for assessing the reliability and validity of the scale. The participants of the surveys were upper-graders in elementary schools, and the subject area was "integrative learning". The results were as follows. Reliability tests showed that the scale was highly internally consistent. Factor analyses showed that the internal structure of the scale was consistent with the pedagogical stages of problem solving learning. The correlations between this scale and the scores from other subject areas that were related to information education were statistically significant. Teachers confirmed that the scale fitted well with their curriculum plans. These results indicated that the developed scale was suitable for measuring "the ability of practical use of information" in schools.

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