Teacher pedagogical considerations when planning literacy programmes in the BYOD digital environment

Abstract

This thesis has examined teacher considerations when designing literacy programmes in a ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) pedagogical environment. Teachers have had to adapt their literacy programmes to encompass the one to one device ratio enabled by the recent phenomenon of BYOD and it is therefore important to consider what influences them as they endeavour to deliver a 21st century curriculum. There is little current New Zealand research where the fields of literacy, teacher considerations and BYOD intersect, and it is hoped that this study will provide insight and add to existing research on digital integration so that evolving literacies have value in classroom literacy programme. Five Year 5 and 6 teachers took part in semi structured interviews, shared their literacy planning and were observed in their classrooms so that ‘in flight’ adaptations to their initial planning could be observed. A grounded theory constant comparative method, in conjunction with the Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) framework, was used for data analysis to sort and analyse emerging themes. The findings indicated that the teachers were confident users of technology and applied a pedagogical lens to instructional design when incorporating personally owned devices into classroom practice, rather than a technology first approach. Instructional design practice mostly referenced ‘traditional’ learning intentions such as writing an information report or summarising the main idea using one communication mode, restricting meaning making to linear pathways. Student needs were identified mostly by traditional assessment criteria such as those found in the exemplars of the National Standards for Reading and Writing for years 1-8 (Ministry of Education, 2009b) and the Electronic Tools for Teaching and Learning (e-asTTle). The digital affordances enabled by the BYOD environment were not fully utilised in many of the lesson designs due to the narrowing of content, influenced by the drivers of standards based accountability and assessment.