Towards Modelling Teachers’ ICT Competence Profile in Europe

Abstract

In all European countries many activities are undertaken to promote the use of ICT in school education. Nevertheless, the full potential of ICT is not being exploited. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of teachers’ familiarization with the use of ICT. Therefore, there are increased efforts worldwide for the design of teachers’ professional development programmes that aim to enhance teachers’ competences for the use of ICT in school education. However, these programmes are mainly designed to address ICT competences that are based on different teachers’ ICT competence frameworks that have been recently developed. Although these competence frameworks aim to tackle the same problem, the diversity in their approaches leads to heterogeneous competence descriptions that cannot be formally described and represented in a unified manner among different European Union Member States. To this end, it is important to model teachers’ ICT competence profile at a European Level in a common and systematic way. This can facilitate the design of teachers’ professional development programmes, which will address universal competences descriptions. Within this context, in this chapter, we focus on (a) modelling teachers’ ICT competence profile in Europe by considering existing teachers’ ICT competence frameworks and selecting the most appropriate and (b) describing, in a machine readable way, the proposed teachers’ ICT competence profile by exploiting existing specifications for competences description.