Constellations of Support and Impediment: Understanding Early Implementation Dynamics in the Research and Development of an Online Multimodal Writing and Peer Review Environment

Abstract

In this article, the authors trace teachers' experiences while participating in an educational technology development and research project focused on the creation and use of an online writing and peer review environment. They follow teachers from their initial expectations of the program, to their response to professional development training sessions, planning sessions, student account setup, and to their initial attempts at utilizing the digital learning environment in the classroom. In so doing, the authors suggest that the path toward and away from successful classroom implementation of emerging learning technologies is a multiple, shifting, and interrelational one, influenced by constellations of factors including affect, administrator support, student buy-in, research and development team knowledge and availability, district priorities, and the amount of upheaval in the personal lives of teachers.

Digital Storytelling: A District Initiative for Academic Literacy Improvement

“…For teachers with one to four years’ experience of previous training, the use of DST in instruction increases from 67% to 100%. These data continue to show the importance of long‐term technology‐supported professional development (Olmanson & Abrams, ). More importantly, they offer guidance to districts on the number of workshops teachers might need before implementing DST projects.…”

“…Such teacher‐external factors, including availability and access to technology, need to be addressed at the district level and have a significant influence on the level and quality of classroom technology use. A study by Olmanson and Abrams () on an online multimodal writing program revealed that teachers’ implementation efforts are contingent upon complex and interrelated factors, including access, administrator support, and district priorities. Likewise, other studies noted that teacher interest in technology integration is closely linked to availability of resources, curricular or cultural alignment, and technical support and training (Rohaan, Taconis, & Jochems, ; Schifter, ), all of which ultimately are tied to district initiatives.…”

“…Despite its apparent promise, DST has been limited to primarily after‐school programs or the classrooms of innovative teachers. Several studies on K–12 technology integration have suggested that district‐level factors play a critical part in the successful implementation of digital writing programs such as online multimodal programs (Olmanson & Abrams, ) or the use of Google Docs (Yim, Warschauer, & Zheng, ). However, no study to date has examined implementation of DST in a school district.…”

(Neo-) Marxism

“…Since the late 1990s, teachers have worked to integrate new media and aspects of new literacies into the curriculum. The range of integration rationales includes an interest in leveraging platform affinity and novelty to inject excitement into content areas (Olmanson and Abrams 2013), rethinking student participation in learning spaces (Vasudevan 2010), encouraging the expression of student identities (Rust 2015), closing the digital divide, and mirroring collaborative ecologies of the twenty-first-century workplace and better facilitating the inclusion of multimodality in academic texts to fulfill evolving State and national expectations (Olmanson et al 2015).…”

Visualizing Revision: Leveraging Student-Generated Between-Draft Diagramming Data in Support of Academic Writing Development

“…Regardless, when students write and revise, their process is shaped by the affordances of their writing platforms. As increasingly ubiquitous digital tools align the in-school composition process with out-of-school processes (Olmanson and Abrams 2013) it is important to consider the relationship between writing platforms and the work they support.…”