Digitally literate teachers in leading edge schools in Norway

Abstract

This paper highlights digitally literate, in‐service teachers in leading edge ¹ schools in Norway and focuses on how they, in their professional development, adapt digital literacy. Today we find a consensus among policy‐makers, researchers, teacher‐educators and teachers that digital literacy must be given high priority and needs to be explored more deeply in our upper secondary schools. Therefore, digital literacy has become the fifth basic competence in the new curriculum and obligatory for all subjects at all stages. Despite this consensus and the increased status of information and communication technologies (ICT), previous ICT efforts have revealed that implementation of ICT has been more strongly anchored rhetorically and ideologically than in practice. Consequently, this paper focuses on whether we, in the new educational reform The Knowledge Promotion (Undervisnings og forskningsdepartementet, 2006), are entering a time of upheaval within this area, at a time when in‐service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge manages to integrate digital literacy as part of their professional development. The paper analyses how teachers have become digitally literate, what they actually do in their professional development and how the school organization manages (or not) to create a fertile ground to achieve mandatory ICT in the new curriculum. In this analysis, a new developed digital literacy model is presented and used as a lens to examine teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge.

Notes

1. Leading edge schools are upper secondary schools that have worked continuously and systematically with ICT implementation over several years. All the teachers have their own laptops, as do a large proportion of the students. These are connected to the Internet via a wireless connection.

2. The Norwegian School system (levels 1–13) consist of primary and lower secondary education (from the age of 6 to 15), and then upper secondary education and training (from the age of 16 to 19). Every Norwegian pupil spends 13 years in school.

3. LMS are software packages that enable the management and delivery of online content to learners. Most LMS are web based to facilitate ‘anytime, any place, any pace’ access to learning content and administration. Typically LMS allow for learner registration, delivery of learning activities and learner assessment in an online environment. More comprehensive LMS often include tools such as competency management, skills‐gap analysis, succession planning, certification and resource allocation (venues, rooms, textbooks, instructors, etc.). (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system).

4. Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of web sites to a full‐fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately, Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0).

5. ‘Screenagers are techno‐savvy young people. They are the first generation to grow up with television and computers at home, and to use music downloads, instant messaging and cellular phones. Douglas Rushkoff first coined the term in his 1997 book Playing the Future. Rushkoff argued that young people will have many advantages processing information and coping with change when they reach adulthood because they have used computers at home since early childhood. Their short attention span may be an advantage in coping with the huge mass of information that also bombards their elders’ (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenager).

6. ‘… digital bildung suggests an integrated, holistic approach that enables reflection on the effects that ICT has on different aspects of human development: communicative competence, critical thinking skills, and enculturation processes, among others. Through greater focus on the integrated use of ICT in all subjects, teachers, and students will develop competence in navigation and the critical use of sources, as well as a sense of the social implications of digital technology’ (Søby, 2003, p. 8).

7. The national Norwegian programme, TeacherICT, was developed for the purpose of all Norwegian teachers. The main goal for TeacherICT was to inspire teachers to use ICT both in their own teaching and as an administrative tool in their daily work. Essentially, TeacherICT is ‘the double didactical perspective’. It contains an expectation that the participants change their attitudes concerning ICT, and participants increase their knowledge and skills related to the use of ICT while using it in their own teaching.