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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about the largest disruption to formal education in recent history and has resulted in school closures and the move to online teaching and learning across the globe. Using data from interviews with 25 teachers and head teachers in England and Greece, this paper aims to capture educators' experiences during emergency remote education (ERE) in spring-summer 2020 and contribute to current and future conversations about the post-pandemic school. Through a qualitative approach, the paper reports on the often improvised and compromised nature of online schooling during the first pandemic lockdown and presents the opportunities and challenges teachers experienced with the move to emergency remote education. It discusses how didactic modes of teaching prevailed, highlights the importance of parental involvement during ERE and argues that the move to online teaching and learning has accentuated digital inequalities. The findings of this study cast light on the hitherto unexplored area of ERE and offer original insights for future policy making, research and practice on how schools can develop readiness and resilience to face future closures in a post-pandemic world.

This paper explores how a legacy digital artefact can be adopted within formal education settings and looks at the pedagogical and other opportunities created by its use within three primary and secondary classrooms in the UK. Through a comparative case study, the paper investigates the potential of using a virtual 3D model of the 1938 British Empire Exhibition in formal educational settings and highlights a number of salient issues and challenges. As the data suggests, engagement with the model created opportunities for playful learning, facilitated motivation and collaboration, and enhanced student interest. However, participation was often compromised by technical inhibitors as well as the wider pressures of the curriculum, teacher time and assessment regimes. Last, the paper considers the range of actors and factors that influenced the experiences of teachers and students who engaged with the use of the 3D model and concludes by considering the implications of these findings.

Digital technologies now form an integral feature of the university student experience and there is a range of studies that explore digital technology use within a higher education context. However, very few of these studies focus on how doctoral students engage with digital technologies. This article aims to throw light on the digital practices of doctoral students and advance understandings of the changing nature of digital scholarship for them. Drawing on qualitative, in-depth interviews with 12 PhD students in a UK higher education institution, the article identifies seven distinct types of engagement with digital technologies and discusses the range of issues that underpin doctoral, digital scholarship practices. Furthermore, it argues that although the stereotypical portrayal of the PhD as a "lonely journey" is seen to be in decline, doctoral students at large exist and work "in a vacuum" rather than within interactive doctoral communities.

The idea of using digital technologies and in particular web 2.0 tools to enhance school collaboration has recently been received with great enthusiasm and a range of new collaborative initiatives has emerged. Through a comparative qualitative case study of four schools in the UK and Greece, this article analyses how online tools are supporting and facilitating school collaboration within the "eTwinning" programme--an EU initiative that seeks to promote web-based learning and collaboration between schools across Europe. In particular, it examines teachers' and students' compromised experiences of the tech-based eTwinning projects and highlights the factors that seemed to be undermining collaboration. It analyses whether the implementation of digital technologies for school collaboration has the potential to transform classroom practices or whether existing habits and "ways of doing" are brought into new contexts--leading to another case of "the old wine in new bottles" syndrome often attributed to the use of digital technology in education.

The notion of school collaboration has become widely recognised as an effective means of fostering cultural links and supporting communication between geographically separated schools. As shall be acknowledged in this paper, school collaboration follows on from a long history of collaborative initiatives across the past 50 years. However, the introduction of digital technologies and the internet in the 1990s has raised new challenges and created new opportunities for "telecollaboration" whilst the growth of social media over the past five years is seen to have transformed the ways in which online collaboration is experienced by most end users. Based on a review of the existing body of literature, this paper offers a critical overview of current models of web-based collaborative programmes--attempting to map out the complex nature of school collaboration and consider the actors and factors that can shape successful implementation into educational practices.

It could be said that in the fast-changing field of education technology the initial excitement for a tool or application usually fades away as the next technology emerges on the horizon--leaving little or no room for critical evaluation of how it may best be used in educational settings. Some critics have identified this endless "pursuit of the new" as a major reason why the promises of educational technology are rarely fully realised. This viewpoint article argues that there is currently a real danger that this pattern is being repeated with Web 2.0. Keen readers of the educational technology literature will already be sensing that the attention of educational technology authors and commentators appears to be shifting once again, away from the now-familiar potential of Web 2.0 applications and towards the more exotic promises and potentials of the "semantic web" and "Web 3.0" technologies. In light of these trends, this short viewpoint reflects upon how to prevent Web 2.0 applications repeating the well-worn pattern of hype, hope and eventual disappointment that has characterised the discussion of educational technology over the past 30 years or so. In particular, it suggests a number of ways that a sustained and rigorous academic study of Web 2.0 applications may move the debate forward in ways that may see the realisation of at least some of the promises of an educational transformation.