With the introduction of smartphones, participation in web-mediated social interaction has become an integral part in the communicative ecology of classrooms. Mobile phone use seems to affect well- documented classroom interaction patterns, where student participation is spatially, sequentially and structurally limited. The introduction of mobile phones into this participation framework has considerable consequences. The aim of this presentation is to investigate how uses of smartphones affect interactional participation frameworks in upper secondary school, and to specify the impact of new media practices for the social mediation and creation of knowledge in classrooms. The analyzed material consists of video recordings of students’ interaction from Swedish and Finnish upper secondary classrooms during 2015-2016. We investigate instances where students use their smartphones during teacher led plenary instruction. During these situations, instructional talk is characterized by a so-called IRE-structure (Initiation-Response-Evaluation)(Cazden,2000), directed to one student at a time in a way that constrains other students’ simultaneous participation. We analyse in detail the students use of different technologies (smartphone, laptop and analogue texts), using Conversation Analysis (Goodwin,1990; Schlegoff,2006) to investigate action formation and orientation to content both in relation to the physical surrounding of the classroom as well as on-line, and how students’ orientation to these different contexts are coordinated in participation frameworks in the situated classroom interaction. The results show that phone use is present and common in all subjects. The interactional space of the connected classroom has a new, multi-layered distribution of interactional spatiality, with previously non-present links between the outside world and the classroom. In the data, use of mobile phones is not oriented to as a problem, neither from students nor teachers. The use is generally silent and non-disturbing, yet potentially interactionally rewarding for the students. The smartphone is mainly used individually, which means that it does not compete with participation in the teacher-led plenary talk. Smartphone use seems to enable participation in interactions that are spatially independent, diverse and flexible in relation to the official classroom discourse. This results in verbally quieter classrooms, where students can spend time on-line, and where the teacher, because of this, can continue to teach relatively undisturbed. Use of smartphones is also shown to work as means for inclusion and exclusion in various dimensions. A conclusion is that instead of being a challenge to plenary teaching, mobile phones enable and preserve this kind of instructional organization, since it resolves some of its inherent constraints for participation.

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