Abstract:

The network society presents itself as antagonistic in the transformations and challenges it invokes, in a "double effect" created by the introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Schools, as a space for renewal and transformation of human capital, social cohesion, economic growth and innovation, require constant adaptation in order to scaffold successive societal transformations. In this sense, teachers, the society’s educators, are called to a ceaselessly readjust to the digital world. The imposed challenges require constant monitoring of technological and digital evolution through, not only the ability to handle, use, apply and integrate technologically but also to understand analytically and reflexively the digital’s impacts. This hinders the full integration of ICT in educational practices, corroborating the relevance of teacher training and continuous professional development in the digital sphere, in a practice that requires considerable technical, artistic and skill mastery. Teachers, as creators of their educational resources, face technical, pedagogical, aesthetic, authoring and infrastructural difficulties, forging barriers to these creations' digital integration, which can narrow the teachers’ perception of ICT’s potential to promote new pedagogical approaches.

In the literature, the attempt to map and identify the teachers’ digital skills is quite visible. Inclusive, pluralistic, equitable and participatory practices have been nurtured by European and international governments (e.g. SELFIE and DigCompEdu – diagnose and pinpoint 21st century essential skills), namely inciting worldwide changes in Education through, e.g., Goal 4 – Quality Education from the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations). The mapping of such skills can support strategies to enhance the teachers’ digital professional engagement, lifelong learning, and the development of critical skills that allow teachers to take full advantage of technologies.

From another perspective, tangible resource approaches in Education might stimulate collaborative learning environments that, in turn, improve students' soft skills, and, together with digital technology, can bridge these two worlds, as advocated by Education 4.0.

Seeking to incorporate professional digital engagement with a recurrent teaching practice – i.e. to create educational resources –, using it as a motto to develop digital literacy in teachers and to overcome technical, aesthetic, pedagogical and authoring barriers arising from inherited infocommunicational processes, hereby we propose an innovative solution to face these concerns: a digital tool directed to the authoring production of tangible educational resources, designed according to the infocommunicational needs of teachers (promoting their autonomy in interaction), in an open repository-aggregator that allows the creation and (re)adaptation of those resources. This digital tool, by the context it provides, reduces the teacher’s cognitive load, by guaranteeing access to graphic elements and ensuring the resources’ aesthetic coherence, reflecting on the respective educational quality, hence solving problems of authoring and graphic origin. In parallel, due to the continuous urge to involve students in active and challenging learning, motivating the engagement with the topics studied, the purpose is to produce tangible resources in the digital tools, encouraging pedagogical innovations and teaching strategies.

Keywords:

Digital Literacy, Educational resources, Teacher professional development, Tangible environments, Pedagogical strategies.