The Digital School: Developing Teacher Competencies

This paper focuses on the process of digitalising schools as an innovative education strategy. We are focusing on teachers' roles in digitalisation, and how school leaders can engage teachers in educational innovation that involves digital media. The paper draws on experiences from an ongoing project in the Municipality of Vejle, Denmark, where 34 elementary and 4 special schools highlight the use of ICT, culture and diversity in the knowledge society (www.vejledigitaleskoler.net). The paper presents approaches to the development of teachers' competences in using ICT for educational purposes, drawn primarily from the experience learned from the Vejle Digital Schools project. It is important to focus on teachers, as they have a central role in implementing educational transformations involved in the digitalisation of schools. Schools face two main challenges, we propose, in connection with this massive development of skills: ICT-based soft-and hardware has evolved, and continues to evolve in tremendous speed: A teacher who has taken a course in educational ICT today, can easily feel (and perhaps rightly so) incompetent the next year, even with regard to the same ICT-based learning methodologies. Interviews with teachers and principals in Vejle (and elsewhere) suggest that when a teacher has been trained, he/she may find it difficult to apply what he/she has learned in practice. Even if the courses touch on basic topics, it may still be difficult to translate the course content, and adapt it for the teacher's own purposes. One of the issues involved in responding to these challenges is developing teachers' competences through practice, i.e. through practice-based development of ICT based teaching and learning. Against this background the question is asked: What strategic considerations and decisions may be involved in improving the ICT competences of teachers as seen through the example of Vejle Digital Schools?