Developing ICT in Teacher Education (DiCTE)

The overarching aim of the project is to develop ICT in teacher education. The project identifies student teachers’ levels of digital competence when entering and towards the end of their studies. Insight on the integration of ICT is compared across institutions.

Background and relevance

Digital technologies play an increasingly central role in the lives of all European citizens.  Digital competence, the ability to successfully utilize these technologies, is essential to address issues of inequity and empower all citizens to participate fully in society.  The project aims to advance our understanding of digital competence in teacher education and share best practices in terms of effective pedagogical approaches used to equip student teachers with these important skills.  

Objective and research methods

The DiCTE project aims to conduct an extensive review of the literature to explore the concept and examine how digital competence in teacher education is being addressed across Europe as well as other countries such as the USA. Following on from this, the project aims to develop a comprehensive survey to establish the level of digital competency of student teachers on entry to teacher education programmes in all of the partner institutions. This survey will then be used in a longitudinal manner to capture any subsequent changes and enable all project partners to benchmark their own student teachers against other partner countries.

The survey will assist the project partners in planning for ICT in their own teacher education courses. In addition, the completed survey will be freely available to other institutions to use to benchmark their own students and advance the agenda of the project. Interviews will be conducted with a sample of student teachers in each of the partner institutions to further explore the issues emerging from the survey of all students.  

Having established this 'baseline' data, the second aspect of the project relates to the sharing of practice and the identification of effective practices.  The collaborative trans-national dimension to the project also aims to begin the debate in relation to minimum requirements in relation to digital competency for all teachers in Europe.