‘You should collaborate, children’: a study of teachers’ design and facilitation of children’s collaboration around touchscreens

Abstract

Touchscreens are being integrated into classrooms to support collaborative learning, yet little empirical evidence has been presented regarding how children collaborate using touchscreens in classrooms. In particular, minimal research has been directed towards how teachers can design for and guide children's touchscreen-based collaboration. Concurrently, the Programme for International Student Assessment and other international organisations have highlighted collaboration and ICT skills as crucial competencies for mastery in the twentyfirst century. Accordingly, this article presents three narrative cases from a touchscreen project in Denmark, where 41 second-grade children and three teachers from two classrooms participated. The cases are based on ethnographic field data and 150 hours of video footage of natural occurring interaction in classroom settings. The ethnographic field data and video footage are examined using a collaboration model and embodied interaction analysis. Each case presents features of the subtle processes of children's collaboration around touchscreens and teachers' role in designing and guiding such collaboration. Thus, this article illustrates teachers' and children's situated processes of integrating touchscreens for collaborative activities in their classrooms.Keywords: children's collaborative learning; instruction; video analysis; narrative research; twenty-first century skills Introduction For more than three decades, researchers and practitioners have been investigating how computers can best help children learn to collaborate. The concept of collaboration and the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in education have been particularly emphasised in recent policy papers and research reports (Luckin et al., 2012) on so-called twenty-first century skills (Dede, 2010;Voogt & Roblin, 2012). Additionally, the technological development of shareable, mobile, interactive and networked devices (e.g. interactive whiteboards [IWBs], smartphones, tablets, tabletops and touchscreens) has highlighted the relevance and urgency of focusing on how such technologies can help children learn to collaborate. Responding to this development, the Programme for International Student Assessment will begin testing children's collaborative problem-solving skills on an international level in 2015 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and

Using interactive technologies to promote a dialogic space for creating collaboratively: A study in secondary education

“…That is, the focus of task attention was interrupted, the participant rested his/her gaze elsewhere and his/her oral contributions were reduced. As in other researches (Al-Samarraie & Hurmuzan, 2018;Davidsen & Vanderlinde, 2016), technological difficulties became one of the main obstacles to cocreativity because they disrupted group flow. In future research, such difficulty should be corrected by providing previous training to students or allowing a computer assistant during the computer sessions.…”

“…Although many qualified voices have stressed the potential benefits of interactive technologies in engaging people in co-creative settings (Wegerif & de Laat, 2011), little is known about what collaborative creative processes are triggered when interacting with digital technologies and what mechanisms elicit the students' engagement in co-creative actions in technological environments (Davidsen & Vanderlinde, 2016;Hennessy, 2001;Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, Viilo, & Hakkarainen, 2010). The research in this paper aims to fill in those gaps in our knowledge and discusses the potential of interactive technology as a means of promoting a dialogic space for co-creation because it has affordances that can open up, widen and deepen the learners' opportunities to generate, modify and reflect on new ideas through multimodal interaction along with talk.…”

Similar or Different? A Comparison of Traditional Classroom and Smart Classroom’s Teaching Behavior in China

“…Teachers often determine the length of students' practice through their predetermined experience and the information collected by teachers' limited classroom inspections, rather than based on the students' real situation. In smart classrooms, on one hand, efficiency refers to the fact that students can complete the learning tasks assigned by teachers under the supervision of background data quickly (Davidsen & Vanderlinde, 2016); on the other hand, teachers use data analysis technology to accurately understand the progress of student work completion and scientifically grasp the student classroom practice time, and then teachers guide students to check after practice, let students fully use the minutes and seconds in the process, and improve the efficiency of classroom practice (Kessler & Bikowski, 2010).…”

Tablet for two: How do children collaborate around single player tablet games?

“…However, these apps are frequently designed without collaboration as an explicit objective (Benton et al, 2018;Falcão and Price, 2009). Furthermore, evidence suggests that classroom interactions around tablet computers are frequently only loosely orchestrated and teachers can be unclear on how to support children's collaboration around them in practice (Davidsen, 2016). This can lead to potentially uncollaborative situations where asymmetry of action exists, with the learning potential of the tablets remaining un-realised (Dillenbourg, 1999).…”