Digital technology and learning design in a K-8 learning community: planning for new tools and new learning

Learning communities, i.e. school boards, administrators, curriculum designers, teachers and support staff try to respond to the public's desire for learning involving digital document technology and to their own beliefs and intuitions about appropriate roles for that technology in learning. They are deluged with digital possibilities. We studied one school's experience of changing and expanding its use of digital technology. The school's experience illuminated the value of recognizing this experience as a multi-step process that accommodates itself to a particular institution: 1) recognizing the institution's existing pedagogical and social culture; 2) identifying the ways new ideas and behaviors are introduced in this school; 3) using those methods and behaviors to integrate digital technology. In the case study, the most sensitive issues in the culture were teachers' adaptation and usage efficacy related to curriculum design, time and space.