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This paper questions the transformational potential of teaching with digital technologies in elementary school by ethnographically examining the use of telepresence robots – which promise new forms of teaching ‚being there‘ – in terms of how it is carried out: How is teaching performatively processed with students who have a physical presence in the classroom even though they are at home? With the hardware „avatars“ a networked showing is observed, on the basis of which practices are analysed as a distributed network event (whose entanglements have been expanded by digitalisation). At the same time, and in contrast, it becomes visible how an increasingly incompatible instructional order is produced, which, for example, endeavors to demonstratively assign performance attributions and associated agency to single individuals. In the process, the accompanying practices experience an actualisation of meaning in contact with the digital, for example, when the teacher‘s tasks or questions seem to be more about demonstrating knowledge and this is instead used as a vehicle for situationally demonstrative practice or exemplification of the functional order of instruction under more difficult conditions: The contrast between the new and the old is used to emphasise the contours of the traditional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]