Tracing Teachers’ Use of Technology in a Laptop Computer School: The Interplay of Teacher Beliefs, Social Dynamics, and Institutional Culture

Research on ubiquitous computing in schools has documented that teachers often change instructional practices over time when using technology with students and has further suggested that teachers’ use of technology may play a role in their shifting toward more constructivist pedagogy. Our two-year study takes an ethnographic perspective in examining how three middle school teachers learned to use technology in the context of a laptop computer program. The ways in which those teachers eventually integrated computers into classroom instruction were powerfully mediated by their interrelated belief systems about learners in their school, about what constituted “good teaching” in the context of the institutional culture, and about the role of technology in students’ lives. The condition of ubiquitous technology did not initiate teachers’ movement toward constructivist instruction. Rather, the laptops were a catalyst that enabled one participant, who had a pre-existing dissatisfaction with teacher-centered practices, to transform her classroom through collaborative student work and project-based learning.