Developing ICT in Teacher Education (DiCTE)

The aim of the project is to gain insight on student teachers knowledge of digital competence through conducting an annual survey of the student teachers. This study is a comparative study. The participants are the University of Valencia, Spain, the University of Malta, University of Limerick, Ireland, University of Oslo and Oslo & Akershus University College of Applied Sciences

The aim of this study is threefold:

• First to gain knowledge of the students’ digital competence when they start at teacher training, as well as to gain knowledge of their digital competence when they graduate as teachers.
• Second, we get an insight into how the teaching of digital competence in teacher education functions, and in this way adapt content and approach on the grounds of this insight.
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• Third, we also aim to gain insight into whether students are qualified to teach digital competence in school, whether as they have the expertise to meet the competence goals in national curriculum. 

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:

1. Identify the student teachers’ levels of digital competence when entering teacher education and compare across institutions. 
2. Identify and benchmark approaches used in the participating teacher education institutions to develop students teachers digital competence. 
3. Identify the student teachers’ development of digital competence during their studies and compare across institutions. 
4. 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.   

Survey: The project aims to develop a comprehensive survey to establish the level of digital competency of student teachers on entry to teacher education programmes in all of the partner institutions.  This survey will then be used in a longitudinal manner to capture any subsequent changes and enable all project partners to benchmark their own student teachers against other partner countries.  

This survey will assist the project partners in planning for ICT in their own teacher education courses. In addition, the completed survey will be freely available to other institutions to use to benchmark their own students and advance the agenda of the project.

Interview : Interviews will also be conducted with a sample of student teachers in each of the partner institutions to further explore the issues emerging from the survey of all pupils.