What is Digitally Mediated Work in a School?

If you walk through a secondary school on a normal day, most of the work teachers do is now touched by a digital system somewhere. Before the bell, there are inboxes and SMS alerts, learning platforms to check, welfare dashboards to scan, excursion forms to upload. During lessons, teachers move between slides, quizzes, chat windows and dashboards while keeping an eye on behaviour and questions in the room. After school, there are parent emails, incident reports, progress comments and, increasingly, experiments with generative AI.

Digitally Mediated Work of Teachers (DMWT) is the term I use in my doctoral research to describe this whole pattern of digital work. It refers to the total set of tasks teachers perform that are created, coordinated or recorded through digital systems, not only the moments when students have laptops open in class.

The framework did not come from a pre-existing model. It was built from extended fieldwork in a Victorian secondary school and a detailed analysis of interview transcripts, classroom observations, staff chat logs and school documents. From that analysis, six recurring strands of digital work kept appearing across sources. These became the six domains of DMWT.

A simple definition

Digitally Mediated Work of Teachers is a descriptive framework. It names what teachers already do inside and beyond the classroom when their work is shaped through digital systems. It gathers together tasks that are usually scattered under labels like “admin”, “ICT” or “data” and treats them as part of one digital task ecology that sits alongside planning, teaching and relationship work.

Put simply, DMWT helps answer questions such as:

• What digital tasks are teachers actually doing in a typical week
• How do those tasks cluster into broad areas of work
• How often do several of those areas collide in the same few minutes

The six strands of DMWT

Across the dataset, six domains of digitally mediated work emerged again and again. In everyday terms, they are:

1. Teachers’ digital literacy
   Teachers’ own repertoire for working safely, securely and effectively in networked systems. This includes managing passwords, handling data safely, basic troubleshooting, separating personal and professional identities, and making informed choices about when and how to use tools such as generative AI.
2. Teaching with digital tools
   Planning, delivering and assessing learning through digital platforms, alongside conscious choices to use analogue methods when they serve the lesson better. Examples include designing tasks in a learning management system, running live quizzes, managing device routines and having offline fallbacks ready when systems fail.
3. Student management and welfare
   Using digital tools to record and respond to attendance, behaviour and wellbeing in ways that meet duty of care and privacy expectations. This can involve logging incidents, updating individual learning plans, recording adjustments and maintaining communication logs with families.
4. Operational management
   The logistics teachers handle across the school, coordinated through digital systems. Duty swaps, excursion approvals, reporting cycles, mandatory training, parent portal posts and bulk communications all sit here. These are the “keeping the place running” tasks that often happen in the margins of teaching time.
5. Data driven decision making
   Using assessment and activity data to adjust teaching and target support. This includes pulling reports from dashboards, scanning for trends and outliers, grouping students for intervention and contacting those who need extra support.
6. Developing students’ digital literacy
   Building students’ capacity to participate safely, respectfully and critically in digital spaces. Teachers do this when they teach source evaluation and citation, discuss online presence and respect, and clarify what counts as acceptable AI assistance, often inside regular lessons rather than in separate “cybersafety” sessions.

These domains give names to the main strands of teachers’ digital labour. They are analytically distinct, but in practice they rarely appear in isolation.

The “mesh” in real time

One of the clearest findings in the study is that teachers’ digital work happens as a mesh rather than six separate streams. A short sequence before 9am might look like this:

• editing a quiz drafted with an AI tool after students notice an invented definition
• logging a welfare note in the school management system for a distressed student
• scanning excursion consent forms and renaming files to meet an operational deadline
• tethering to a phone when the Wi Fi drops so the uploads will complete
• refreshing an attendance heat map to identify students who need a follow up

By the time the first class starts, several domains of DMWT have already been active. This is the ordinary texture of the day, not a special event.

Why introduce DMWT at all?

Most familiar models of digital teaching, such as TPACK or DigCompEdu, are designed to help us think about instructional design. They focus on how content knowledge, pedagogy and technology interact in lessons, which is useful, but they largely leave out the welfare, operational and data work that sits at the centre of teachers’ digital days.

These frameworks rarely ask what happens when the quiz server crashes and a teacher has to compress a file, approve a duty swap and log a welfare alert before the bell. They do not track the time spent feeding data into systems or the informal help required to keep those systems usable.

DMWT is proposed to sit alongside those models. Instead of replacing them, it brings the often overlooked digital labour of teachers into view, particularly in welfare, operations, data work and the ongoing maintenance of teachers’ and students’ digital literacy.

Why this matters in schools

For teachers, having language like DMWT can make it easier to describe a day that often feels like near constant digital triage. It provides a way to talk about specific digital tasks, and the way they collide, in workload and wellbeing conversations.

For school leaders and systems, the framework offers a structured way to map digital workload before introducing new tools or policies. Instead of asking only whether a tool improves learning, we can also ask where it sits in relation to these six domains, which domains it adds to, and which tasks it might replace. That makes it easier to see duplication, legacy systems and hidden expectations that rely on teachers’ unpaid time.

For researchers, DMWT offers an empirical vocabulary for studying digital labour in schools. It invites questions about how different schools configure these domains, how informal peer exchange sustains them, and how new technologies such as generative AI are layered onto the existing mesh rather than arriving on a blank slate.

Call to action: map your own digital day

If you are a teacher, leader or researcher, you might try this simple exercise:

• Take one ordinary day and list the digital tasks you complete from getting to work to going home.
• Group them roughly into the six strands above.
• Notice where several strands stack up in the same short block of time, or where work spills out of the school day.

If you are comfortable sharing what you find, I am keen to hear how DMWT shows up in other schools and systems.

You can:

• contact me through the form on this site
• reach out via LinkedIn (search for Dominic Brash)
• or email me using the address on the Contact page

If you would like to explore using this framework in your school, system or research project, get in touch and we can talk about possibilities for collaboration, workshops or joint work.

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