Researching the everyday digital

The challenge

Supporting teachers to learn about their students’ everyday digital uses

As mobile and connected digital practices reshape social, interpersonal and learning relationships, it is crucial for teachers and schools to be informed practically and conceptually about how these technologies are actually being used in everyday life. It is increasingly challenging to keep pace with rapid change, and to know and respond to the ways in which the digital is woven in and around children’s worlds and family lives.

The Everyday Digital Project brought teachers together to develop strategies to research what the children at their schools did with digital media when at home and with their friends.

This website contains an account of how the project worked with the teachers and then videos of the teachers themselves talking about what they learned from the project and what works well or not so well in their schools, with their students, colleagues and parents in the school community.

To help teachers’ research their own school communities’ digital experiences the academic partners first introduced the landscape for young people growing up today embedded in digital culture.

The project then concentrated on practical ways to support teachers to work with their peers both to:

challenge assumptions about children and young people’s digital media use; and
to invent and devise simple activities to help them learn about their classes’ digital use (in and out of school).

Teachers were encouraged to work with their pupils in a contemporary ‘funds of knowledge‘ approach sharing and testing their emerging findings with their students in order both to validate this kind of knowledge but also to ensure that students and their families can feel confident that their informal and everyday media use is understood by the more formal world of the school.

The second phase of the project then shifted focus to bring teachers together to consider what kind of curriculum challenge and what kind of pedagogical innovation could stand as an appropriate response to this new kind of knowledge about the school communities’ use of the digital every day. We deliberately took on central social and political questions about, for example truthfulness, validation, privacy and safety – themes that teachers consider require structured intervention – and built these themes into future syllabi, classroom projects, school policies or indeed home/school activities or links.

This site includes: Strategies where the teachers describe their approaches to their research; and their Findings where the teachers discuss what participating in this project taught them about their students’ out-of-school media use. (NB: Both the Strategies and Findings pages contain a range of videos so may take some time to upload).

Strategies

The project worked with a group of 16 teachers from primary and secondary sectors across Barwon South West and Melbourne, in Victoria, Australia; our thanks to them for their participation. There were a few whole-school IT coordinators in the group as well as one teacher from a flexible learning centre. Six academic members of the School of Education at Deakin University worked with the teachers.

Investigating the use of apps

Rather than doing a survey, some of the primary schools decided to investigate with the students what were the most common apps that the class used and how might these apps relate to different curriculum areas. This raised questions for both the students and teachers of what constitutes learning in a subject area and what criteria might be generated to determine whether or not an app has educational value.

What are some of the common apps that you have on your electronic devices, and how might they be used for educational purposes?
In what ways might you be able to engage students in the type of curriculum mapping with resources within your classrooms?
What changes to curriculum areas can you potentially see from this discussion?
Are there other ways you might be able to use technology in the classroom to enhance and deepen learning?
What constitutes a ‘learning’ app?
What curriculum outcomes are students addressing by engaging in this type of work?

Bring Your Own Device programs

A number of schools have a ‘Bring your own device’ program. The primary school teachers here discuss some of the parental concerns they have had around BYOD programs and issues of privacy, usage, and how this will be monitored by the school. While it was raised a number of times throughout the research project, these teachers discuss the difficulty of negotiating the boundaries between home and school usage and where the responsibility lies.

What are some ways schools and parent can negotiate the boundaries between home and school digital use?
How do you negotiate the boundaries of a device used in a BYOD program?

Identifying and dealing with issues

The issue of how to negotiate boundaries between home and school usage of digital technology was raised a number of times through out the research. The teachers in this clip discuss some of the problems they face when negotiating these boundaries and some potential ways forward, including areas of further investigation.

How much of what the teachers are discussing are problems or issues in your teaching contexts?
How much of the discussion is about prevention of problems rather than dealing with problems of digital technology use?
Perception of digital technology use is frequently raised (in this clip and others) as part of the issue. What are some of the common perceptions around technology use in your school? How accurate are these perceptions? What are some initiatives the school could implement to change some of these perceptions?
One of the ideas presented is that technology at school is for education and home it is for entertainment. Does this view or use of technology have merit?

Learning outside of school

Jake and John discuss some of the results of the survey they conducted, namely the ways in which students engage with technology. The discussion with students during the survey highlighted some discrepancies between what students and what teachers may view as educational.

How do your students use technology? For what purposes?
Can any of this digital technology use be perceived as use for educational purposes?
In what ways might we embed some of the students’ outside school digital practices into the classroom? What benefits are there to taking this approach?
Is it an issue that students do not necessarily perceive their use of technology at home as educational?
Is it an issue that the devices bought for a BYOD program are not being used at home as an educational tool?

Negotiating with parents

In the clip below the teachers discuss the different ways they engage in conversations with parents around BYOD programs and the use of digital devices at school. The teachers discuss how the ways parents engage with technology influences these discussions. Questions are raised around how to approach parents and where are the boundaries between home and school responsibility.

What information is usually presented at your school’s ICT/BYOD information nigths?
What are some of the common concerns from your parents around students’ ICT/digital technology use?
What opportunities are there for dialogue between teachers and parents around different ICT/digital technology use?
What potential is there for information nights and other types of programs to allow for ongoing dialogue concerning students’ ICT/digital technology use?

Students as experts in curriculum

One of the ways that teachers approached their research of student digital practices was to involve the students in an inquiry unit exploring how everyday ‘non-education’ apps could be used in the classroom. In the clip below we see some primary school teachers discuss the inquiry unit and the ways students then identified, justified and began using these apps in the classroom. Also below are some examples of the student videos discussing the ways in which they saw the apps being used in the classroom and the curriculum areas the apps are relevant to.

What apps on your digital device might be useful as an educational tool? What curriculum areas does it address?
Are there some unusual or different ways of using these apps that you may have not initially thought of?
How might students use an app to represent their knowledge differently?
How might these apps be used to help differentiate the curriculum?

Student presentations

Conducting surveys

Several of the groups of teachers decided to approach the research by surveying their students on digital technology at home. The following clip discusses some of the approaches to these surveys but also some of the results, including how many hours students use devices at home, what students are using technology for and the students’ perceptions of social media use. Some of the issues or complexities of conducting surveys are also discussed.

Did any of the results surprise you? Do you think if you were to survey your class you would end up with similar results?
How might you use some of these findings to inform school policies or curriculum practices?
In thinking about how students use digital technologies outside of the classroom, what are you curious about? What sort of questions might you ask your students?
How might the survey results influence your teaching?

Findings

Digital life outside of school

The teachers in this clip, from both primary and secondary schools, discuss how students are using technology – for what purposes – as well as the most popular apps and social media students are engaging in and the length of time students are using technology outside of school.

Is the length of time students are engaging with technology an issue?
Is student engagement with technology outside of school the responsibility of the school, especially when it comes to matters of appropriate use, privacy and length of use?
How might schools work with parents and students to make links between home and school digital usage?
In what ways, if any, does your school have conversations with students about how they use technology outside of the classroom?
How might knowledge of student usage of technology be useful for teachers and the curriculum?
In what ways can schools address issues of access to technology and social media? Is this access essential?

Learning what is educational

In this clip the primary school teachers discuss whether students perceive technology as either a tool for education or a distraction. They discuss whether students use of digital technology is an issue or whether the issue is with the way the technology is being used.

Is technology a distraction or symptomatic of something else?
Where does the school’s responsibility start and end? How does this compare to the responsibility of parents?
What is meant by the term ‘educational’? How do we define educational use in terms of students’ use of digital technologies at home?

Legal implications and boundaries

This discussion mostly focuses on the results of the surveys conducted by the secondary school teachers. The results raised questions as to whether students understood the terminology used in the survey but also how honest the students were in their responses. Both the primary and secondary school teachers discuss issues around student access to technology and whose responsibility is it to govern how technology may be used outside of school hours.

What are some behaviours that students might identify as ‘negative’ especially in an online environment?
Is it actually an issue that students are engaging with digital technology for long periods of time, for purposes other than education? Why?
What are some ways schools and parents can work together to both monitor and inform students about appropriate digital technology use?
What are some behaviours or technology use that we see as ‘appropriate’? Why?

Working with parents

A constant theme in the discussion was the ways in which schools work with parents around their students’ digital technology use and where the school responsibility ends and the parents’ responsibility begins. The teachers in this clip reflect on the ways in which they both have worked with parents in the past and the ways they might improve this relationship in the future.

Are the ways students are engaging in digital technology actually an issue?
What are some ways your school has worked with parents around digital technology use? Was it effective?
How might schools address issues around the perception of technology use in the classroom?
How might schools develop a partnership between teachers, parents and students to support digital technology use both at home and at school?

Scaling across the school

One of the main concerns of any project is ‘where to from here’. In this clip both the secondary and primary school teachers discuss their approaches to broadening this project to include other parts of the school, especially through using the key findings to inform future policies and practices. All teachers agreed that the support of leadership in the school is instrumental for further development of curriculum that bridges the difference between students’ out of school and in school digital use.

How might the findings of this research project inform the policies and practices at your school?
What makes an ‘effective’ BYOD (bring your own device) program? And how might schools continually assess the program effectiveness?
What are some of the challenges that face schools in implementing new technology practices? How might some of these challenges be navigated?
How might students play a part in developing effective technology programs and implementing these across the school?

Surprising findings

While some of the survey results did not surprise the participating teachers, there were some that did come as a surprise. In this clip both secondary and primary school teachers discuss some of the survey results that surprised them and why some of the student responses were surprising.

What did you find surprising about the survey results? How was this different to what you expected?
The teachers were surprised by the lack of student use of technology to ‘create’. What do we mean by using technology to ‘create’? And how do we encourage students to ‘create’ more or in different ways? Is this in fact necessary?
How many of your students are concerned with their online identity and community? Is this an issue? How might we use their participation in these communities in the classroom?
How do we address issues of equity issues of access to technology?

Unsurprising findings

In the following clip the teachers from two different primary schools discuss how they were not surprised by some of the results of their surveys. This was especially the case when discussing the difference between how students in the lower years of primary school engage with technology, compared to the upper year levels. The teachers also discuss the types of media students are engaging with, as well as the type of other outside of school activities students participate in.

How do you think your students engage with technology outside of the classroom?
Did any of the results of the surveys surprise you?
What similarities can you see between the students discussed in the video and the students in your classroom or school?
Do you think the increase in student use of technology is an issue?
How might you begin to use some of these results to inform your own teaching or curriculum development?

The teachers' learning

The work with the teachers took the form of introductory activities as a whole group, working with each other away from school, and then in small school-based teams preparing activities for their classes. This page includes an outline of the introductory activities and some of the work the teachers produced in schools.

Introductory activities

In the initial workshops, teachers engaged in activities reflecting on the importance of out-of-school media use and some of the difficulties of bringing the students’ out-of-school media use into the curriculum. The aim here was to get teachers to reflect on their own media use, and to look at the ways in which popular discussion is often framed by media as a series of contradictory hopes and fears, scares, panics and dreams. The activities were designed to encourage teachers to reflect on the importance of out-of-school media use and the difficulties of bringing these topics into the curriculum. An overview of the activities is presented below.

1. Me and My Media

Each teacher – speaking as a person – shares:

a day of media use – build a list of device -use/time/place
intimate/personal and/or unpleasant/scary experience – build a list of concerns/pleasures
positive and negative views on a family members’ media use & their interpretation of how media affects the other – build a group list of patterns
how much they and their family spend on devices/platforms etc.

2. My Students’ media

Each teacher – speaking as a person – shares:

a surprising/awkward/disciplinary experience with media use in school
an account from a parent about difficult/problematic media use out-of-school
parents’ positive and tale of “digital learning”
best use of media in your teaching experience and why.

The research

After the initial activities, the teachers began working in small school based groups to design ways of researching students’ digital media usage outside of school. This became the basis of the rest of the workshops and teachers shared and reflected upon the research they had conducted, the results and the ways it had already begun to inform policy and curriculum in their schools and classrooms.

3. Researching digital cultures and practices

Teachers working in pairs plan activities using the following prompts:

Survey of a class’s use of media: what would you want to know and why?

Meaningful platforms: what media do individual students really invest in and why

How to get students to think about questions of ownership, use of personal data? What student centred activities can help this?
How to get students to think about media and society? How do they imagine other people are affected by the media? What are they think it’s important to know and how to behave?

Below are some examples of the data that some of the teachers collected: