Case Study of the Integration of Digital Competencies into Teacher Preparation

Abstract

The requirements imposed on schools and the competencies of teachers change depending on the development of society, and currently their constant growth is considerable. These facts lead to the need to continuously innovate pre-service teacher training, especially with a focus on creating professional digital literacy. The creation of a proposal of an optimal model of pre-service teacher training in the field of teacher trainees’ professional didactic-technological competency development was the subject of the research, which is described in the article. The described research examined the importance of the integration of various kinds of digital didactic tools into pre-service teacher training curricula with regard to the successful performance of the teaching profession. The necessary research data were obtained on the basis of screening the opinions of teacher trainees in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (n = 280). The respondents of the research survey expressed, in terms of various aspects, their opinions on the importance of integrating the issue of working with specified kinds of the given digital means into the curricula of teacher trainees’ study programs. The obtained research data were analysed depending on three segmentation factors of the respondents, which were the nationality of the student (i.e., the COUNTRY of his/her study), the GENDER of the respondent, and the combination of these two factors, i.e., COUNTRY X GENDER. According to the achieved results, there is a need to include or strengthen the teaching of software applications such as ActivInspire, FreeMind, SMART Notebook, Google Docs and, if possible, Prezi and Mindomo, and also a need to emphasize the methodological aspects of the use of these technical means in teaching.