The study has investigated, How is the investigative and productive community of Danish
high school students strengthened through professional reading in digital teaching materials
through a design?, the use of digital teaching materials in the high school and developed
prototypes based on design principles. A literature review has been conducted, three high
school classes were observed in 14 teaching lessons, 27 students wrote lived experience
descriptions, one class was interviewed. From this emerged four themes (digital ways of
working, diversity, individuality and distractions) that described digital reading, from which
four general student types could be identified (digital social creators, digital passengers,
digital soloists, digital dreamers) and in particular, our observational studies revealed the use
of digital teaching materials as a constructivist tool that was especially facilitated in a social
constructivist manner based on a pragmatically grounded teacher-set task solution. This
could be transformed into design principles that were adjusted with students in a workshop.
From this, seven prototypes for digital teaching materials could be designed that embraced
the observed themes and associated design principles while deciding which affordances are
central. The prototypes were evaluated with four students using a primarily dialogue-based
workshop, however with individual quantitative assessment on a scale from 1-5 based on
four different areas. Three prototypes are assessed to be immediately implementable in a
digital learning resource and strengthen the research and production community, two
prototypes are assessed to need to be adjusted and two would need to be redesigned
before they can contribute positively. The project here has concentrated on the student's
perspective, and in further research it is recommended to investigate the context a digital
teaching materials is part of when analyzing the activity systems where a digital teaching
material resides.
Keywords: Digital reading, digital teaching materials, media ecology, affordances, high
school students