Resources Promoting Digital Tools Integration: Design Principles

A number of various didactical materials are currently available, so that teachers of different school levels, from different countries, can access a huge amount of such resources designed with the objective of supporting their classroom practice. The impact of these resources is studied from different perspectives, trying to analyze the process of taking and reworking the available material for implementing it in one’s own classroom. In particular, the notion of teacher’s pedagogical design capacity (PDC) has been introduced to refer to the teacher’s work of planning and implementing classroom activities and to specify the components it entails in a way to account both how the teacher appropriates and uses resources, and how this ability develops. This approach reveals a possible tension between the intended use of a resource conceived by its designer in order to achieve established educational goals and its use interpreted by the teacher and possibly adapted to her classroom situation. This chapter intends to address this complexity in the specific case of didactic material aiming at fostering the integration in school practice of a digital tool (DMIDT). Building upon consolidated results and theoretical notions elaborated in previous studies, we intend to address the issue of the design of DMIDT with respect to:

How the designer can/should help the teacher, as a potential DMIDT user, to evaluate its didactic potential and fitness for her own educational purposes.

How the appropriation of the DMIDT by the teacher and its implementation in the classroom are considered/fostered by the design.

How the appropriation of the DMIDT can boost the development of teachers’ PDC.