Abstract:

The educational ecosystem, composed by a diversity of stakeholders (e.g., headmasters, teachers, students, and caretakers), shapes the future society, hence requiring continuous analysis and adaptation to the world’s innovations.
Digital technologies, although being part of this ecosystem for a long time, are constantly evolving and therefore demanding new competencies to handle, manage and understand them critically. The fast-paced production and dissemination of new contents into the digital space, as well as the formats’ diversity of such contents, pose challenges towards the verification of the published content, namely its quality (design and substance), organisation (curatorship), and intellectual property rights (authorship).
Hence, digital competency is set as a pillar for the teachers’ professional development since digital is embedded in today's society. Teachers, as essential drivers for educational change, have to permanently pursue their professional development. In this current digital democratized society, in which users can create and disseminate content online, teachers have become digital content creators who design, (re)use, and share educational resources online regarding pedagogical syllabus, being innate curators of those contents.
Arising from the challenges imposed by digital technologies on the educational ecosystem, teachers experience technical (e.g., competencies), pedagogical (e.g., educational potential), aesthetics (e.g., large texts, technical quality), and authorship (e.g., e-content licensing) barriers.
In this context, strategies that promote teachers' professional development (in particular concerning digital competencies) in a seamless integration with teachers' pedagogical procedures, associating day-to-day activities with this professional development – such as the creation of educational resources – are essential.
Digital platforms must meet the intrinsic needs for their appropriate employment through intuitive and evolving design considering the users' digital competencies and cognitive load. In order to create pedagogical content resorting to digital platforms, they must integrate features such as: being open repositories; respecting the ownership by integrating licensed content that unequivocally identifies the authorship; allowing the remixing of content (intrinsic to teaching pedagogical practice); articulate the procedures regarding the creation of pedagogical content respecting its creative and design process.
This paper introduces the Dig2Phy platform, which purpose is to encourage and support teachers to create digital educational resources that aim to be used by their students in tangible scenarios. Thus, it depicts how the Dig2Phy platform integrates the mentioned considerations – in order to respond to the educational ecosystem’s needs, particularly to promote the development of teachers’ digital competencies – presenting the platforms’ functional and technical requirements, and some initial sketches of the platform’s structure. Finally, potential scenarios for teaching integration of the Dig2Phy platform are suggested, as well as the next steps concerning the research that integrates the development of this platform.

Keywords:

Teacher Professional Development, Digital competency, Educational Resources, User-Generated Content.