Given my interest in the use of ICT in education, the title caught my interest, and I took up the book for review. The book is a collection of articles by a range of researchers and practitioners, divided into five parts. Part 1, “Patterns of Innovation for Instructional Models,” has two chapters. The first chapter looks at schools evolving from offering a “restricted world view for easier understanding” to being full-fledged knowledge creators, and not sending students into a knowledge era with pre-Newtonian physics, pre-Darwinian biology, and so on. They should build their own world model and to strive to improve it with time. Chapter 2 is on some innovations relating to instruction that were tried in various schools in China. A variety of approaches are briefly discussed including design-based learning, robot research, the use of tablets, synchronous lectures, and so on. This highly stretched-out chapter begins with many ambitious thoughts, but eventually covers only fairly well-known ground.

Part 2, “Methods to Design Learning,” starts with chapter 3 on “Instructional Design Methods and Practice,” a good chapter, but quite general in nature and not able to relate much with K-12 education. The chapter touches on emerging technologies like social media, outlines challenges in designing instruction, and advocates the need to create educational technologists. Chapter 4 is concerned with the use of informal learning, particularly with respect to science. Some approaches to extend the learning to informal spaces are outlined. Chapter 5 compares the infrastructure construction strategies of the US and China, touching on aspects such as broadband, classroom, terminal equipment, and so on. Its connection to the part and the overall theme of the book is not clear.

Part 3, “Development Model of Digital Learning Resources,” begins with chapter 6 on developing digital learning resources for teachers in China. Essentially, this shallow chapter deals with the Chinese project “teaching site covered by digital education resources,” and describes its website and components. Chapter 7 takes you to digital content design in North America. Various types of content, the development cycle, and issues such as build or buy and quality assurance are discussed briefly.

Part 4 is about e-leadership. Chapter 8 introduces the various aspects of school leadership from curriculum planning to performance monitoring of teachers and learners, and surveys various leadership decision support systems reported in the literature. Chapter 9 looks at use of 3D printing for fabricating physical mechanisms as required to support instruction. This is an interesting direction, but could be expensive to afford for many schools. Chapter 10 explains the importance of leadership to drive transformation and training of teachers using the Intel Education Transformation model.

Chapter 11 of Part 5 continues the Intel thread, introducing the Intel Teach Elements for teacher training. Teacher development using ICT is the focus of this final part. Chapter 11 introduces teacher training needs in terms of the technology, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) framework, and looks at the use of Intel Teach Elements for this. Chapter 12 introduces a Microsoft initiative called the Teacher Education Initiative (TEI), based on the TPACK framework. A new framework called Building 21st Century Learning Design is added to this. Use of this initiative in a number of countries is mentioned. Chapter 13 is another generic chapter introducing the replace, amplify, transform (RAT) framework for characterizing the role of ICT in education and discussing its implication in teacher training. Chapter 14, the last chapter of the book, looks at national policies in the context of ICT adoption and associated teacher capacity building. National policies of a few countries are analyzed.

One interesting aspect of the book is that the topics taken up for discussion (leadership, national policy, and so on) go beyond the list of topics often seen in such books. Another positive aspect is the good collection of references at the end of each chapter. Against my expectation based on the title, the book disappointed me overall. Except for one or two chapters, hardly any chapter looks at anything global, and there are really no serious comparisons. It would be useful to know how the innovations mentioned are implemented, and I would have liked to see a comparison to alternatives, their effectiveness, the hurdles faced, and their actual impact on the teaching learning process. Most of the chapters seem to lack a target audience and end up being loosely descriptive. The lack of a proper preface or connecting glue makes the book into quite a loose collection of chapters and leaves the reader with no big picture. Even the different parts of the book, though nicely titled, have no explanation on the role and expectation of the chapters within. And the book ends as abruptly as it started. On the whole, the book has some useful information related to ICT in education, but could benefit from improved structuring and linking of the chapters.