Teaching in a contemporary school means working in digital spaces as much as physical ones. Most teachers start the day by opening inboxes, learning platforms and welfare dashboards before they walk into a classroom. Across the day they move through portals, spreadsheets, reporting tools and now AI systems, often while trying to teach live in the room.
Digitally Mediated Work of Teachers (DMWT) is the term I use in my doctoral research to describe this whole pattern of digital work. It comes from two terms of fieldwork in a Victorian secondary school, combining classroom observation, interviews and everyday digital traces from staff platforms. DMWT is my way of naming what teachers were already doing, rather than asking them to fit into someone else’s framework.
What DMWT means
DMWT looks at teachers’ digital work as a whole, not just “using technology in lessons”. It brings together things that are often treated separately, such as:
• Writing and organising lesson materials in digital spaces
• Logging behaviour and welfare information and following it up with teams and families
• Tracking assessment in dashboards and chasing missing work
• Managing rolls, reporting, excursions and compliance through school systems
• Responding to emails, messages and notifications from students, parents and colleagues
• Helping students build their own safe and critical use of digital tools, including AI
Seen as one bundle, these tasks form a digital workload that sits alongside planning, teaching, and relationship work with students.
Six strands of DMWT
In the study, six overlapping strands of digital work kept appearing in teachers’ days:
• Teachers’ own digital literacy, staying safe, organised and effective across changing systems.
• Teaching with digital tools, using platforms, content and devices in planning, delivery and assessment.
• Student management and welfare, recording and responding to attendance, behaviour and wellbeing.
• Operational management, handling the digital logistics of reporting, excursions, communication and compliance.
• Working with data, reading and acting on assessment and activity data to support students.
• Developing students’ digital literacy, helping young people navigate online spaces, digital presence and acceptable use, including AI.
These are not neat boxes. In a few minutes a teacher might check a dashboard, adjust a seating plan, record a welfare note and email a family. That small sequence touches several strands at once. DMWT is a way of talking about that braid rather than pretending each task lives in isolation.
Why it matters
DMWT matters because language shapes what we are allowed to see. When all of this is labelled simply as “admin” or “ICT”, it disappears from serious conversations about workload, staffing and professional learning. When we name it as Digitally Mediated Work, it becomes possible to ask clearer questions. Which digital tasks are essential to student learning and safety? Which are inherited or duplicated? Who is quietly carrying the load for others? Where does AI genuinely help, and where does it just add extra checking?
For teachers, DMWT can make it easier to describe what your day actually contains. For leaders, it can help you map digital workload before introducing new tools or policies. For researchers, it offers a practice based way of thinking about digital labour in schools that reaches beyond the classroom screen.
Explore DMWT
If you would like to go deeper, you might start with:
• What is Digitally Mediated Work in a School?
• The Digital Morning, How Teachers Start the Day
• The Hidden Digital Work Behind Every Lesson
• Why Existing “Digital Teaching” Frameworks Do Not Quite Fit
Dominic Brash 