Activity-centered approach for the design and orchestration of digital classroom activities

The quantity and variety of digital devices available in schools keep growing, but teaching practices have not followed. The low use of digital technology can be explained by the difficulty of creating digital learning activities.

We propose to combine concepts from research on creating and running learning activities in the classroom with work on running digital activities more generally. We present the contributions and limits of these two conceptual frameworks for managing digital learning activities.

We interviewed teachers to understand how they create and run their digital activities. In the classroom, teachers mainly face technical problems (unstable network, hardware limits) and must adapt their plans to cope with them.

We propose an adaptable architecture to address these technical problems. It supports digital activities under different constraints: activities work with or without a connection, on the various devices present in the classroom, and the architecture adapts to each school’s infrastructure. This architecture is embodied in Toccata, an orchestration system for creating and running digital activities in the classroom. Toccata implements the design recommendations we identified.

Finally, we looked for the interaction strategies that let teachers best manage digital devices in class. Through observations of middle-school classes, we identified two main classes of tasks: sharing content and remotely controlling devices. An elicitation study showed that control tasks are easier to perform than content-sharing tasks, notably with a worn device such as a smartwatch.

We found that selecting the devices for content sharing remained particularly complex in terms of interaction. Our results open new avenues for managing digital devices in class. However, further work is needed on sharing, reusing and redesigning digital activities.