Creating 'Space Commercials' New Technology Applied in School Context

When new technology enters classroom teaching in Primary Schools there is a special interest in how it is being used. History shows that transformation and development in schools take time. Introducing new technologies into a new place tends to change the social interaction and also the conditions for interaction. Because of that there is a need for better understanding of the implementation of technology as tools for teaching and learning in classroom context in the 21 century. A main question is how these technical resources impact on student learning? The study reported here is from a Swedish classroom setting of nine-year –old students working in groups using these mediating tools for learning. The analysis of the empirical material focuses on student action and talk within a school discourse where the goal is to fulfil a classroom task; to create a commercial movie in groups using the computer program IMovie. The content in the commercial movies starts out from a project work ´The Space´ that the students have been working with during eight weeks. During the students work new forms of representations and communication are made potentially available using these new technical tools in the classroom discourse. The instance analysed here is from a socio- cultural approach of learning where the focus is on the interactive, institutional and the context features of the practice. The study shows that during classroom work students are using the available resources in different way in collaboration. The examples given from the study points out various ways of handling these technical resources and the affordances of different modes used in the computer program. The competence of how students handle the technology, search on the Internet and how they transfer the information into knowledge seems to be important features for learning. Examples of these findings are given in this paper