Abstract:

Greece these last 15 years has developed and implemented a plan for the integration of digital technologies in education and more specifically in the teaching practice. The training of teachers is a part of this plan. This training is relatively long (approximately 380 hours of instruction over a year) and versatile, as it includes lectures, homework, evaluation activities, school practice, training of adults and a variety of other activities.

In this paper we present a summary of a specifix part of this plan, namely the section related to teacher’s training, particularly the training of trainers. The monitoring of this project at national level, almost from its very beginning, gave to us the opportunity of collecting a large volume of raw information and data of both quantitative and qualitative nature.

The main purpose of this education/training is the transformation of teachers to trainers of their colleagues. This transformation has a very practical dimension:the trainers must of course have special skills in handling software and more generally contemporary digital environments. They also should have theoretical knowledge about topics such as pedagogy, didactics, adult learning theories and teaching methodologies.
However, the most important part of their training is, in a way, “non-visible”, or more precisely, it is perhaps very difficult to be described analytically. This part corresponds to a very specific kind of digital literacy.

Candidates trainers should be aware of the most common practices used in modern digital social networks, but not of course only as mere experienced users, but also as critical 'readers' of those practices. Even more, this critical view of the social practices should lead them to a creative use of social media: they have to show to their students the specific features of this new digital ecology and to devise new ways of teaching the creative and innovative use of these features.
The educational use of digital social networks, of web 2.0. and more generally of digital environments, should be oriented towards the consideration of digital environments and more generally of digital resources, as a kind of wealth, or as a kind of tool (in the broadest sense of the word) that can enrich the learning experiences of students. The usual official practice, however, often identifies the learning experience with digitization: for example, greek authorities consider the digitized books in the form of a .pdf file, as a major opportuniy to access to information and creating new knowledge. So they try to digitize all books used in primary and secondary ecucation because they believe that this an enormus progress. Unfortunately, teachers often adopt similar points of view. In this case, the use of digital technologies or digital resources, in most cases is more a ritual that teachers have to respect, than a true challenge to reorganize their teaching.
In this framework we try to identify all these elements that support the real, profound process of the transformation of a teacher to a specialized trainer and to a critical user of digital technologies.

Keywords:

ICT and Education, Teacher's training, digital literacy.