Abstract:

In the knowledge society, increasingly digitized, the professional development of teachers is a key to building and a right-duty for their careers. Among the pedagogical-didactic, organizational and relational competences there is the digital one that has a transversal character. In Italy, the focus on technologies began in the 1990s with the national teachers training on Information and Communication Technologies (ForTIC) up to the 107/2015 Law (known as “The Good School”) that introduced the National Digital School Plan and the Teacher Training Plan 2016-19 in which the priority is to promote the integration between digital technologies and new learning settings. On the theoretical-didactic level, instead, among the main models, which regulate the process of acquiring the digital skills, we refer to the TPACK of Mishra and Koehler and the Digital Competence Framework for Educators (DigCompEdu), developed by the European Commission.

The objective of this work is to present the main opportunities derived from the vocational training, taking into account all the factors that contribute to delineating the professional teacher profile. At present, we use distance learning that adopts different methodologies such as blended learning, which involves the alternation of moments in presence and moments of on-line learning, and the flipped classroom, where the learning setting is inverted.

The survey starts from the analysis of national and international sources and normative documents that regulate the teachers’ professional development, the digital skills acquisition and aims to deepen the epistemology, the constructs and the methodologies of distance learning.
This renewal in training modalities, characterized by classrooms, teachers and real and virtual learners, books and printed material and digital documents, from the figure of the online tutor and network tutorship seem to represent elements that can improve the quality of the Italian educational system, allow the professional development of the school staff and, consequently, improve the provided scholastic service.

Keywords:

Teacher training, Technologies, Digital competence, Blended learning, Flipped classroom.