‘I'm a completely different person at home’: using digital technologies to connect learning between home and school

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring children's, parents', and teachers' experiences of communication between home and school and connections between children's learning at school and home in order to consider how using digital technologies to mediate the home–school relationship might support children's learning. Parents, teachers, and children welcomed the idea of using digital technologies to communicate between home and school, hoping that more timely communication could avoid problems at school. There were few connections between learning at home and in school; participants saw school and home as separate domains and the boundaries between the two were strongly maintained. It is argued that for connections to be made between learning at home and in school, elements of both need to be drawn together in a space in which both are valued, and that digital technologies could support the creation of such virtual third spaces.