hello my name is Seray Ibrahim and today i'm presenting our paper which is titled understanding
the situated practices of school technology leaders in the early stages of educational
technology adoption i'm presenting on behalf of myself and my co-authors Mina Vasalou and Laura
Benton we're based at the ioe ucl's faculty of education and society prior research has shown
that whole school technology initiatives require leadership coordination and collaboration at
an institutional level and often this happens through a designated school technology leader
technology leaders are champions of the technology who are responsible for motivating and supporting
teaching staff in the process of adopting new educational technologies in the classroom
different school settings can have their own ways of enacting leadership processes and it's not
always clear how leadership practices are shaped within specific school settings their operational
structures and the social relationships developing between the technology leader and the teaching
team it's also not clear how these factors impact on the success of educational technology adoption
in our paper we contribute to empirical research on educational technology adoption
by illustrating four diverse cases cases of how technology leaders coordinated this process
we present a systematic methodological approach for investigating school-based technology adoption
by focusing on situated action and we propose recommendations for hci researchers who are
interested in supporting technologies technology leaders through this process before talking about
the study i'll briefly describe the navigo game which is an educational technology that
was developed as part of an innovation project that was funded by the european union horizon
2020 programme the navigo game covers the first four years of the primary literacy curriculum
it's aimed at children aged 5 to 8 and at older children aged 8 to 11 with reading difficulties
navigo has an egyptian-inspired narrative and the child is tasked to find their grandma
by exploring a pyramid with their avatar entering the pyramid activates a series of game activities
through which they progress towards this goal navago contains over 900 game activities that
cover a range of literacy skills and schools that signed up to use nevergo received a set
of new android tablets with the game installed and received a two-hour teacher training session with
the participating teachers in school we took a multiple case studies approach involving four
schools with multiple teachers using navigo across different classes and coordinated by a technology
leader our research question asked what are the processes that technology leaders engage in and
how do they support or hinder technology use our sub questions explore the concerns and practices
of school technology leaders when introducing educational technologies in the classroom
we've named the four schools blue orange silver and yellow schools some things to note they are
all inner city primary schools in blue silver and yellow school the technology leader was
a classroom teacher and was also the school literacy lead specialist and in yellow school
the technology leader didn't hold a role on the school middle or senior leadership team unlike in
the other three schools we held semi-structured interviews with technology leaders and also
recorded field notes and gameplay usage data from the technology to help us to develop a credible
account of what was happening in each school and we use schematic analysis to analyze the data
our findings generated three main themes that characterize technology leader concerns
and actions and these were technology leader challenges with resource and time management
teacher agency and divisions of labour and communication and monitoring strategies
i'll now describe each of these schools were given 30 to 60 tablets to ensure the smooth
running of the navigo game in the early stages this meant that technology leaders
were predominantly concerned with setting up the charging and storage solutions and this
and resolving practical issues around this in all four schools they opted to set up their tablets in
a lockable space away from the classrooms but this had its own challenges and at silver it meant that
teachers didn't always have immediate access to the tablets when they were needed in class
for yellow the challenges related to keeping the tablets charged and the leader explains over time
they did just die out and then they never really got charged again and that's the reason why people
weren't using them on the theme of teacher agency and divisions of labour we observed a
hierarchical leadership model in three out of the four schools where the school senior leadership
team was responsible for key decision-making which also encompassed the use of the new educational
technology when it came to identifying teachers to involve in the new technology initiative
the four schools handled this differently the technology leaders at silver and yellow
both pre-designated teachers who would be involved in using navago in class but at silver this became
problematic as teaching assistants who were tasked with running group sessions had little to say
on sharing their views about the technology use in contrast at orange school the technology
leader took a different approach and opted to approach staff who would be more likely to engage
owing to their experiences or interests in using educational technologies in the classroom
on the theme of communication and monitoring our analysis showed that technology leaders
often acknowledge the importance of setting up effective communication channels with teaching
staff and helping them to establish a shared understanding of the school's vision for using the
technologies at blue and orange where the navigo game was introduced at a smaller scale across two
or three classes technology leaders could manage communication and monitoring more successfully
through informal communication opportunities i'll now highlight some of the challenges and
recommendations that we identified and a fuller description of these is available within our paper
so within the need for recognizing tasks and distributing the workload as a team
some of the challenges that technology leaders faced was problem solving and establishing
solutions for tablet management our findings highlighted opportunities for supporting leaders
to reflect on practical steps for down scaling or adapting charging and storage solutions for
specific classes considering ways of identifying when and how to involve teachers schools face
challenges in finding opportune moments for introducing the technology in the school year
one way of supporting this is to encourage schools to introduce the technologies early on in the
school year when other extracurricular activities are not happening which might otherwise distract
and lastly under the heading of communication and monitoring strategies that are in line with
the scale of the implementation we reflect on the challenges of collectively monitoring the
material aspects of the technology and its uses and our findings identified that it's
important to understand about the existing school communication channels in advance and encourage
technology leaders to consider how sufficient these channels are for supporting the scaling
up of the use of the technology a more detailed account of each of these is available in our paper
thank you for your attention and i look forward to your questions