Abstract:

Teachers' digital competences is one of the growing needs for teacher’s training (Ranieri, 2022), as also demonstrated by the recent pandemic period where the sudden onset of the need for distance learning highlighted a diffused unpreparedness of teachers (Ranieri et al., 2017), not only in terms of the ability to use technologies but also from the point of view of their integration into the teaching practices (Carretero Gomez et al., 2020; INDIRE, 2020; Ranieri et al., 2020; SIRD, 2020). According to the recent literature (Luo, et al, 2020), an effective way to actively involve the teachers, and future teachers, in the development of these competences is to give them an active role in the co-design of resources and scenarios, as also demonstrated in other OER production experiences (Ranieri, 2012).

In this perspective, the present work aims at describing an educational scenario to foster future teachers' competence in the design of teaching activities using OERs and integrating digital technologies, to promote future teachers’ awareness on how to support the development of students' digital competences, while developing at the same time future teachers’ digital competences (Ranieri et al., 2018).

The educational scenario has been structured according to a collaborative project based learning strategy and has been carried out in 5 weeks (1 hour per week) involving one hundred and fifty students of the course of Education and Learning Technologies of the University of Florence (2022/2023). It started with a preliminary assessment of future teachers’ perception of their digital competences using the SELFIE for Teachers, a self-assessment tool developed by the European Commission to help teachers reflect on their level of digital competences in their professional practice. The work with future teachers was therefore oriented with the use of the digital competence framework, the DigComp (Vuorikari et al., 2022) and the online toolkit, developed within the European project DETECT (Developing Teachers' Critical Digital Literacies). This toolkit aggregates educational resources and teaching practices on digital skills issues, thus considered as an OER (Hylén et al., 2012; Luo et al., 2020). The design phases have been organized into 3 main parts, starting from the definition of learning objectives on the first step, moving to teaching strategies and details of specific activities and concluding with the construction of an evaluation strategy. After a peer review process, future teachers were given a satisfaction questionnaire.

As previously pointed out, involving teachers in the production of educational paths is part of the training process. In particular, having co-designed some scenarios based on the dimensions of the framework, the students confirmed that it was an opportunity to deepen the issues related to their digital skills and to understand how to support the development of students’ digital competences. It may therefore be important to favor approaches that directly involve teachers in the research process, through the collaborative production of tools/resources/pathways, with the prospect of building a community of teachers who "try, test, suggest, modify and improve" (Ranieri, 2012, p. 176).

Keywords:

Digital competences, Open educational resources, Teachers' training.