ABSTRACT
This chapter lays out how instructional practices with digital screens can be informed by students’ complex and evolving digital/visual literacies and accomplished through mediation—the orchestration of authentic conversation with, through, and around what appears on digital screens. In the digital screen mediation model, a teacher interacts not uni-directionally, but with students as she orchestrates authentic conversations. Through direct agency with digital screens learners become epistemologists and engineers and get treated as such by teachers and peers. Digital screen mediation means authentic conversation about what appears on a commonly viewed screen or screens. Digital screen mediation means embracing well-established views of optimal teaching and learning practices in the service of developing the social, cultural, and academic minds of students. Digital screen elements can be used to illustrate, anchor, and focus talk in interaction as well as to attract and steer attention, elicit reactions, and/or track topics.
