TeachDigital – Increasing Teachers’ Digital Competencies

We are looking for teachers interested in attending our training course Quality Teaching with Digital Tools – further information and registration details can be found starting August 2021 on the TeachDigital website.

The research project TeachDigital – Increasing Teachers’ Digital Competencies is part of the graduate program Digital Competencies for Teachers and Trainers at the University of Potsdam and studies the importance of design characteristics of teacher education for the development of teachers’ digital competencies.

Teachers’ digital competencies represent critical requirements for the competent and qualitative use of media and tools in class in order to realize their potential for teaching and learning (Drossel et al., 2019; Redecker & Punie, 2017). However, until now, teachers generally tend to assess their own competencies in this area as at an average level (Huber et al., 2020). In this context, teacher education gains particular importance, where digital competencies can be taught, increased and further refined in a targeted way (van Ackeren et al., 2019). Nevertheless, currently there are only a few studies on professionalization measures and processes in the context of digital media and tools.

Research question                 

Against this background, the project seeks to answer the question of to what extent training characteristics can encourage the development of teachers’ self-assessed digital competencies and use of digital tools for designing high-quality instruction.

Project aim

The project aim is to develop and implement a practical training period to increase teachers’ (self-assessed) digital competencies in evaluating students using digital media and tools (Redecker & Punie, 2017). Over the course of the 3-month training course with alternating online and practical phases, participating teachers gain the opportunity to test in their own classrooms the qualitative use of digital tools to assess students’ learning status, give individual feedback and conduct lesson evaluations.

Target group

The training is geared toward teachers of all subjects at schools in Berlin and Brandenburg.  For the planned cooperation among the participants, at least two teachers from the same school must register in order to form tandem partners. The training is projected to start in November 2021. Registration as tandem teams can take place starting 16 August 2021 via the contact form on the TeachDigital website.

Cooperation

The training course is designed together with  Prof. Dr. Dirk Richter and M. A. Emily Müller (Educational Science Research at the University of Potsdam).  We also cooperate on the training project with National Institute for School and Media Berlin-Brandenburg.

Publications

Read more about our research for the project here.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Contact

Please direct any questions about the content of the research project or registration for the training to project team member M.Ed. Isabell Runge.