Turn to face the Bard: making sense of three-way interactions between teacher, pupils and technology in the classroom

How do pupils work together using educational technology? How does the teacher intervene and otherwise monitor that work? How does educational technology reveal or alter existing two-way interactional relations between teacher and pupil? This article addresses these questions within the context of a longitudinal, naturalistic, classroom-based study of Kar2ouche®1 , one such educational technology designed for use in the study of Shakespeare. In the course of pursuing these questions the authors uncover the fine, orderly detail of interactions between teacher and pupils through which a task set by the teacher is attempted and accomplished. They also introduce notions of adequacy and acceptability accorded to lessons in which unfamiliar and potentially problematic technology is utilised, as well as provide a modest yet compelling contribution to the debate surrounding how most effectively to research classroom-based educational technology in use.