ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic destabilized the prevailing grammar of schooling and forced schools to rely on digital technologies to create new routines and practices. This offers a unique opportunity to examine the interplay between digital technologies and the temporospatial features of schooling, and how these relations were mediated via contextual features. Based on semi-structured interviews with principals and teachers in Muslim-Palestinian and secular-Jewish schools in Jerusalem, this paper qualitatively analyzes the main technological tools used by educators: instant messaging (WhatsApp), video-conferencing (Zoom) and school-wide platforms (Google Classroom). Our findings stress how technological affordances varied according to socioeconomic status and diverging perceptions of schooling. Specifically, we found that lower-SES Palestinian schools, who faced more acute challenges, utilized digital technologies to restabilize the grammar of schooling in order to monitor and support students' basic needs, whereas average-SES Jewish schools focused on facilitating informal interactions that catered to students' emotional wellbeing. © ISLS.