The relationship between teacher training preferences and their digital skills on social networks

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. Several international reports have revealed the importance of teacher education in ICT as a key factor to innovation and educational improvement. Recent studies analyze the teachers’ skills to take advantage the educational potential of these tools. In this  paper, we try to study the relation between teachers’ training preferences and their digital skills in social networks, allowing us to discover which of the strategies for teacher education are the most effective to achieve an advanced level of digital competence. METHOD. We have carried out a research based on a survey to 1701 teachers from 114 schools in the area CEP Algeciras-La Línea, Cádiz (Andalucía, España). Two scales were applied to measure digital competences and learning preferences, which got reliability coefficients of .92 and .82 respectively. RESULTS. Teachers show a moderate level of digital skills, of which teaching skills are the less developed. Teachers with a good attitude towards the combined use of all training strategies and teachers, who prefer collaborative learning strategies and independent learning jointly, are those that express an advanced level of digital competence. We didn’t observe differences in digital competence of teachers depending on gender but we found them depending on age. DISCUSSION. These results are consistent with other research on teacher education in ICT, which show deficiencies in teacher education in order to do a better pedagogical use of ICT. This research provides some evidences which allow us to extract conclusions to guide teacher training in ICT.