We are very grateful that a paper by an alumnus of the Yamada Laboratory, who is currently working as a school nurse at an elementary school, has been accepted as an educational practice paper in the Japan Society for Educational Technology (JSET) journal!! It was great news to start the new year. It was originally a chapter of her master’s thesis, but I told her that this chapter absolutely had to be turned into a paper and that she had to repay the teachers and the principal who cooperated with the data collection, so the alumnus worked hard to write it.

Mamiko Eto & Masanori Yamada (2018) Educational Design and Effects of Health Literacy Education Connecting Health Education and Disaster Prevention Education, Japan Journal of Educational Technology, 41(4) (to be published)

We would like to express our deepest gratitude to the reviewers and the editors in charge for their guidance leading up to the acceptance of this paper. Thank you very much. Thanks to you, the analysis results from this data have been able to see the light of day. We would also like to thank the elementary school teachers and the principal (who has since retired) who cooperated with this classroom practice. I believe this research was made possible by the support of many people.

As for the theme, due to the regional characteristics, there are many natural disasters, and this is a classroom practice research that incorporates health education as a practical measure that leads to health maintenance during natural disasters, incorporating gamification and the Knowledge-Constructive Jigsaw Method. In elementary and junior high schools, it is difficult to find time for health education, and there are only a few hours allocated for it per year. I believe this is the result of the alumnus’s hard work to see if she could conduct even slightly more effective health education within that limited framework. It seems that there are many school nurses nationwide who want to do something about this, so I hope that the results of this research will be a reference for the practices of school nurses in Japan.

There are only a few teams, such as Professor Yamauchi’s team at the University of Tokyo, that are conducting educational technology research related to disaster prevention, so I believe we were able to contribute findings from educational technology research to disaster prevention education as well.

I am very happy about this.