Digital Media in Schools During the Covid-19 Lockdown: Teachers’ Experiences with Choosing Teaching Strategies

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic unexpectedly led school teachers to exclusively using digital technologies. Few insights exist so far on how teachers choose, in such situations, digitally supported teaching strategies to actively engage their students in the learning process. We explored these choices by conducting semi-structured interviews with eight secondary school teachers from a large city in southern Germany during school closures. Relaying on the ICAP framework, we found that, for instance, teachers used websites with hypertexts to engage students actively, playful programming platforms to engage them constructively, or online group discussions to engage them interactively. Teachers’ choice had to take technical constrains into account, such as the limits of available mobile data volumes, students’ digital literacy, and the purpose for which new material was presented. Our findings suggest that categorizing learning activities according to students’ ICAP levels of cognitive engagement can help teachers make decisions about their use of educational technologies.