COVID Teaching Experiences as Disrupting Events to Promote a Paradigm Shift in K-12 Mobile Technology Integration

Abstract

Although many K–12 teachers were reluctant to integrate mobile devices into their instruction (also known as mobile learning) before the COVID-19 pandemic, the shift to emergency remote or hybrid learning disrupted business-as-usual educational practice. The present mixed methods study investigated 16 K–12 teachers’ perspectives about mobile learning and how COVID-19 influenced those perspectives in an online educational technology course held in the early months of the shift to remote or hybrid instruction in 2020. Data included participant responses to background questionnaires, mobile-learning readiness and technology adoption surveys as well as course artifacts such as discussion board posts. Findings included that the teachers considered mobile devices to bring new opportunities for learning, able to improve twenty-first century skills, enhance learning in more flexible ways, with an aim to improve student-to-student communication. Participants’ personal COVID teaching required many to use mobile devices for teaching and learning for the first time or in new ways. Their COVID-19 teaching experiences disrupted teacher participants’ mobile learning perspectives. Teachers observed students’ social and academic needs being met flexibly, newly recognizing mobile learning as critical and potentially transformational; the pandemic “changed everything.” Teachers, such as the participants of this study who have some training in mobile learning, are increasingly ready to be the change.