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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 policymaking, research and practice on how schools can develop readiness and resilience to face future closures in a post-pandemic world.

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.

Pedagogical opportunities offered by 3D immersive environments are not restricted to subject-based knowledge but also include non-disciplinary and cross-curricular key skills. This pilot study introduced a large 3D scene of a non-extant architectural exhibition into teaching and learning activities at three UK schools. From observation and qualitative data capture, a comparative case study identified a number of pedagogical opportunities and challenges. Despite diverse teacher and student approaches, a number of common factors were identified including constructionist teaching methods and the suitability of 3D environments for developing cross-curricular key skills and capabilities. In relation to the literature, this paper analyses how subject-aligned use of the 3D model met with differing levels of success, identifies four key skills that emerged from student use of the model across all three schools, and considers how challenges might be translated into further learning opportunities.

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 prominence of digital technologies has been increasing steadily since the 2000s in many areas of society. A number of new internet tools have emerged, which can be said to differ substantially from the forms and the initial concept of the World Wide Web as it emerged into mainstream technology use in the 1990s. These new digital technologies appear to be especially connective and social in nature. As Flaythornthwaite and Andrews argue (2011, p. 94) “what is new about current technologies is that they bring into institutions and organizations a suite of practices that originate in open, web-based interaction.” Within educational communities the use of digital technologies in the classroom has been largely received with enthusiasm as it is seen to present educators with numerous opportunities for teaching, learning, and collaborating.

As the previous chapter highlighted, the path toward implementing digital technologies into successful school collaboration is a complex one. Looking beyond the enthusiasm as well as skepticism that surround the educational potential of social media, a range of issues can be identified that are associated with the use of digital technologies for school collaboration. For instance, it emerged that the particular contexts and conditions within which the different case study projects were enacted largely shaped the use of the technologies and the modes of collaboration. While the availability of a range of digital tools created similar opportunities for the participants, the actual student and teacher engagement with the technologies and their participation in the collaborative projects shared similarities but also differed to some extent.