Digital technologies play an increasingly central role in the lives of all European citizens. Digital competence, the ability to successfully utilize these technologies, is essential to address issues of inequity and empower all citizens to participate fully in society. However as the research highlights, teacher education has not been successful in integrating digital competency as part of initial teacher education programmes. This gap in skills and knowledge can diminish the subsequent educational experience of pupils in schools. It also places the teacher at a professionally vulnerable position as digital competency also encompasses a broader understanding of ethical and legal aspects of digital technologies in education that are having an evermore increasing impact on the professional lives of teachers. For example, issues associated with informational security, data safety and handling as well as privacy are some of the important issues encompassed by digital competence.
In light of this pressing need, this project aims to firstly conduct an extensive review of the literature to explore the concept and examine how digital competency in teacher education is being addressed across Europe as well as other countries such as the USA.
Having established this 'baseline' data, the second aspect of the project relates to the sharing of practice and the identification of effective practices. Through targeted dissemination of such practices via planned workshops in each partner country, the project aims to educate other teacher educators in the partners' jurisdictions and widen the discussion at a national level in each participating country.
Therefore the activities of the project are to:
- Identify the student teachers’ levels of digital competence when entering teacher education and compare across institutions.
- Identify and benchmark approaches used in the participating teacher education institutions to develop students teachers digital competence.
- Identify the student teachers’ development of digital competence during their studies and compare across institutions.
- Create methods for integration of digital competence for developing student teachers digital competence and disseminating tools and knowledge related to these methods for digital competence in the participating institutions.
While the survey component of the project will have a considerable impact, the most significant impact of the project relates to the sharing of practice in terms of the integration of ICT and development of digital competence. This sharing of practice is not only amongst the project partners but each project partner will also share practices within their own countries thus extending the reach of the project and widening the conversation in relation to digital competence in teacher education.
Through these targeted activities the project aims to advance our understanding of digital competence in teacher education and share best practices in terms of effective pedagogical approaches used to equip student teachers with these important skills. The collaborative tran-national dimension to the project also aims to begin the debate in relation to minimum requirements in relation to digital competency for all teachers in Europe.