Teachers’ Digital Skills Readiness During COVID-19 Pandemic

Maria Perifanou,Katerina Tzafilkou,Anastasios A Economides

doi:10.3991/ijet.v16i08.21011

Maria Perifanou, Katerina Tzafilkou + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3991/ijet.v16i08.21011

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Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis revealed the necessity for teachers to have digital skills in order to effectively teach online. Teachers should be able to exploit, use, and apply digital technologies in all educational activities. This paper investigates teachers’ perceptions regarding their digital skills for performing their teaching and professional responsibilities during the pandemic. More than eight hundred teachers participated in a survey regarding the use of digital technologies in their teaching and their professional responsibilities. Indicative digital tools that can be used by digital competent teachers are also presented to cover all areas of the teachers’ professional activities. Their answers revealed that they mostly used digital tools for finding, evaluating, and developing educational resources as well for teaching. They also used digital tools for self-study, students’ assessment, as well as interacting and communicating with students. However, they hardly used digital tools for other teaching activities such as feedback and final evaluation of the students, or revising the educational resources. Finally, they could not deal with long-term planning, management, and development of either their school or education in general. Although it is important for teachers to effectively respond to their daily emergent teaching responsibilities, consideration should also be given to the long-term planning and development of the digital school and digital education in general.

Highlights

The emergent situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic exhibited the necessity for all teachers and students to have digital skills
This paper provides insights on the teachers’ digital skills and use of digital technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic
Education is fast moving to a digital education mode, teachers and educational authorities should carefully plan for the future

Summary

Introduction

The emergent situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic exhibited the necessity for all teachers and students to have digital skills. Fifteen European countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, France, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, Switzerland Spain, United Kingdom -ENG, WLS, and NI) adopted the use of self-assessment tools to enable teachers to self-evaluate their proficiency level of digital skills, identify their needs and plan their professional development. The “International Computer and Information Literacy”, ICILS 2018, teachers’ survey [28] found that most teachers had high confidence on their ability to find useful educational resources on the Internet → (95%) create presentations with simple animations (84%), organize educational activities with students using digital tools (84%), and assess students (78%) [28] They had low confidence for using a learning management system (59%), contributing to an online discussion (58%), and collaborating with others over shared platforms (57%) [28].

A Survey on Greek Teachers’ Digital Skills During Pandemic

Conclusions and Future Research

Findings

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