During the last decades most spheres of society have been digitalized which has changed patterns of communications, relations and habits in people’s everyday life at work, in school, at home, in politics, etc. This is especially true in the developed countries even though digitalization is also a fact in many sectors in the developing countries as well. Two thirds of the schools in Sweden, where this study takes place, have equipped or are about to equip all pupils with a computer or tablet. This can be understood as the implementation of a new (digital) infrastructure for learning in the classrooms, which might change the conditions for learning radically, which some of the earlier research have indicated.
In this study we focus on the changes that digital resources in classroom might bring into pupils’ writing processes, especially what collective and individual literacy strategies the new technology supports. The setting of the study is a classroom (year 2) in a primary school where the early literacy learning has been digitalized. The material is based on video typed classrooms observations of a particular writing process as well as the produced texts. Thus, both teacher-led activities and pupils’ individual literacy activities at the computers are studied.
The findings show a dynamic relation between collective literacy strategies constituted by the teacher and pupils in teacher-led activities and pupils’ individual literacy strategies constituted in relation to the digital resources. This is visible both in terms of content and form of text and text production. Another notable finding is that the pupils’ individual strategies vary, even though they meet the same collective literacy resources. Yet another finding is that the digital recourses open up for new possibilities for pupils’ agencies in their writing process.