Teachers’ Digital Skills Readiness During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis revealed the necessity for teachers to havedigital skills in order to effectively teach online. Teachers should be able to exploit,use, and apply digital technologies in all educational activities. This paperinvestigates teachers’ perceptions regarding their digital skills for performingtheir teaching and professional responsibilities during the pandemic. More thaneight hundred teachers participated in a survey regarding the use of digital technologiesin their teaching and their professional responsibilities. Indicative digitaltools that can be used by digital competent teachers are also presented to coverall areas of the teachers’ professional activities. Their answers revealed that theymostly used digital tools for finding, evaluating, and developing educational resourcesas 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 andfinal evaluation of the students, or revising the educational resources. Finally,they could not deal with long-term planning, management, and development ofeither their school or education in general. Although it is important for teachersto effectively respond to their daily emergent teaching responsibilities, considerationshould also be given to the long-term planning and development of the digitalschool and digital education in general.