The journey to digital pedagogy in secondary schools - how peer facilitation can support a technology program

Digital Literacy (formerly ICT Capability) is one of the seven general capabilities outlined in the Australia curriculum designed to equip young people with the knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions to live and work in the twenty-first century (ACARA, 2021). The modern world is increasingly digital, with immense technological literacy required for many job roles and career paths. For this reason, technology in education has been and will continue to be a focus point for Australian schools and beyond.

While opinion commonly supports the premise that there is a need to prepare our children for a digital world, successfully deploying such programs in schools has been fragmented (ACARA, 2014). This study explores the common factors that lead to successful technology programs being deployed in schools and further builds on existing knowledge of whether peer facilitation can further support a classroom technology environment.

Through a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach, this thesis explores these factors firsthand, collecting rich data to inform the continuous improvement of a classroom program and then analyses the completed dataset through a Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) process. Rigour applied to a conclusive dataset via thematic analysis performed over the top of DBR analysis is methodologically significant and novel to the broader research community.

This study provides a valuable contribution to the field of educational technology by combining theory with practice in working classroom environments to suggest a framework based on the successful factors that include teacher professional learning, device to student ratio, financial investment and the new factor of student peer leadership. This framework gives a practical direction for future planning and deployment of programs.