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. Following on from this, 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. 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. 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. This is connected to intellectual output 1 and 2. Identify and benchmark approaches used in the participating teacher education institutions to develop students teachers digital competence. This is connected to intellectual output 3. Identify the student teachers’ development of digital competence during their studies and compare across institutions. This is connected to intellectual output 2. 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. This is connected to intellectual output 4. With five project partners involved in the project, the initial reach of the work will be very extensive as it is planned that all student teachers in each partner institution will participate in the survey. 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. 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 trans-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.
The Digital Competence in Teacher Education (DiCTE) project addressed the need for newly qualified student teachers to be able to integrate ICT in their teaching and aimed to collate data on student teachers’ digital competence. The objectives of DiCTE were to o identify student teachers’ levels of digital competence when entering teacher education and compare across the participating institutions o identify and benchmark approaches used in the participating teacher education institutions to develop student teachers’ digital competence o create methods for integrating digital competence in teacher education and facilitate the sharing of best practices The participants in the DiCTE-project were from five European Universities: Oslo Metropolitan University (lead), University of Limerick, University of Malta, University of University of Oslo and Universitat de Valencia. All partners offer education programmes either for primary, secondary and post-secondary levels through the provision of undergraduate initial teacher education degrees, postgraduate Masters in education or a Masters in teaching and learning. The first goal of the project involved a review of existing literature to identify the key issues in the field. This provided the project with an overview of different models defining digital competence for student teachers. The review highlighted that digital competence is a complex area. Through a synthesis of the key aspects gleaned from this task the literature review proposed a novel framework that encapsulated all the key areas identified in the review. This framework was named the PEAT model, an abbreviation of the four key dimensions: Pedagogical, Ethical, Attitudinal and Technological. The pedagogical dimensions relate to one’s knowledge and understanding of unique pedagogical practices afforded by technology in both specific subject areas and broader ‘professional’ educational practices that transcend subject or classroom use. Ethical dimensions relate to the broad range of cyber-ethics issues that teachers need to be aware of, for example, privacy, copyright and source awareness. The attitudinal dimension relates to one’s openness to explore new and emerging technologies and their potential in education. The technical dimension relates to one’s knowledge and understanding of essential aspects related to digital technology. These four dimensions of the PEAT model provided the foundations for the structure of the student questionnaire and an overall guiding framework for the development of the project. (For further information on the PEAT model: https://dicte.oslomet.no/peat/ and to access the literature review: https://dicte.oslomet.no/ The various conceptualisations of digital competence that emerged from the literature were particularly important in the development of the survey tool. The survey tool was designed to identify student teachers’ levels of digital competence when entering teacher education. A report describing the process of developing the questionnaire (survey tool), and the rationale behind both the questions, structure and content as well as a record of the decisions taken in its design was developed in addition to the survey tool. The survey tool is available at: https://dicte.oslomet.no/ The survey was conducted three times during the project period and revised after each round accordingly. Data collected was used to benchmark and compare across the participating institutions. The third output of the project was to identify effective technology integration practices in the participating institutions. Having selected particularly innovative and effective practices, these were shared with the project partners. To facilitate this sharing, a template was developed to streamline the presentations of different practices and make them easily comparable. A report describing this and the team’s reflections on this process was also developed. The report is available at: https://dicte.oslomet.no/ There are several long-term benefits to the DiCTE project. For the teacher education sector, the development of the PEAT model is a significant contribution to the field as it attempts to synthesise the key dimensions of teachers’ digital competence in a manner that is easily accessible to all teacher educators. In this way, DiCTE has made a notable contribution to the debate and development of our understanding of student teachers’ professional digital competence. This contribution is not only reflected in the published reports from the project but also through dissemination of the project’s work at conferences and notable scientific publications. There are also long-term benefits for the project partners. The project has raised the importance of technology integration to a more prominent level in the participating institutions. The sharing of practices has facilitated a cross-pollination of ideas which has led to greater innovation at a programme level in the respective institutions.