Abstract:

Mobile learning has increased significantly during the last years. This is due to the recent technological advances in mobile and wireless technologies and the affordances that they can offer to education such as time and location independence, ubiquity and context awareness, adaptivity and personalization, social interactivity and easier administration.

However, for an effective integration of mobile learning in schools, teachers should have the appropriate competencies in order to integrate mobile technologies in their professional practice.

Existing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) frameworks provide guidance to pre- and in-service teacher training on the use of ICTs across education.

Two examples of such frameworks are the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (ICT CFT v.3) and the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu). The focus of these frameworks is not on specific digital technologies but rather on how digital technologies in general can be used to enhance and innovate education and training. Therefore, the development of a specialised framework that explicitly defines the mobile learning competencies that teachers need to have in order to effectively integrate mobile learning into their professional practice would be useful.

The current study proposes a conceptual framework for teachers’ mobile learning competencies. The framework incorporates aspects of teachers’ professional practice such as teaching and learning, assessment, pedagogies, mobile learning technologies and resources, professional engagement. In addition, the framework identifies three expertise levels: novice and beginner, competent and proficient performer and expert.

The proposed framework aims to extend existing general ICT competency frameworks towards including mobile learning competencies and provide explicit links between mobile learning competencies and teachers’ continuous professional development.

Keywords:

Mobile Learning, Teacher Professional Development, framework.