In classrooms of today, as teachers and students have become equipped with laptops, tablets and phones, social interaction no longer depends on face-to-face interaction alone but has become dependent upon communication mediated by screens of various sizes and shapes (Nilsberth et al., 2022). The constant connectedness and access to digital devices means that classrooms become hybrid spaces for social interaction where students participate in communications on a continuum between being on- and offline. From the perspective of interaction order, this has been shown to increase student participation in classroom interaction and release some of the general constraints related to traditional IRE-patterns in teaching (Sahlström et al., 2019). However, there could potentially be tensions between the teacher’s talk and the students focus with regard to subject content in the connected classroom. This presentation departs from ethnomethodological understandings of the classroom interaction order (Mehan, 1979), and address questions about how the conditions for creating shared focus towards subject content in screen-mediated plenary teaching can be investigated and understood. It is part of the larger video-ethnographic project Connected Classroom Nordic (CCN), where digitalisation of education is understood from a media-ecologic perspective in terms of changed environments and infrastructures where different media, analogue as well as digital, mutually relate to, remediate and affect each other (Strate, 2017). The analysis draws on video-recordings with multiple cameras from a Swedish lower secondary school, where the same class of students have been followed during three years in subjects of English, Swedish (L1), mathematics and social studies. The three cameras simultaneously followed the teachers, a focus student’s desk interactions and the focus students’ screens. Drawing on notions of creating shared epistemic stance in interaction, two examples of teaching instances, one in L1 and one in social science, were selected for multimodal interaction analysis (Goodwin, 2007). A specific focus was on how shared epistemic stance towards subject content were managed in interactions between teacher, student and different semiotic structures in the hybrid social environment of the connected classroom. Preliminary findings show how teachers’ use of pre-made presentations through for example Powerpoints or learning platforms might constrain possibilities to bring in students’ previous knowledge and questions in the shared classroom dialogue. On the other hand, students’ engagement with subject content sometimes increased on an individual basis as they could search for information or try out solutions on their own laptops, in parallel to the teacher’s talk.

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