This paper is based on a project investigating the use of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) as tools for children's group-based learning in primary science. A series of science activities were designed with participating teachers, in which groups of three or four children used the IWB to access information, consider options, plan actions and make…

Classroom discourse is structured by socially accepted ways in which knowledge is presented and by established procedures for carrying out educational activities. However, the underlying linguistic and social ground rules are usually implicit, for students as well as for teachers. The implicitness of these ground rules has been attributed to…

We report on a case study examining the effects of a technology adaptation on patterns of discourse in a sheltered English high school science unit on electricity. The focus here is on how the tool, a classroom response system (CRS), affected access to and participation in classroom discourse with regard to developing science literacy among…

This paper presents a multimodal discourse analysis of children using "drill-and-practice" literacy software at a primary school in the Western Cape, South Africa. The children's interactions with the software are analysed. The software has serious limitations which arise from the global political economy of the educational software…