Digital pedagogies for teachers' CPD

Abstract

The continuous professional development of educators is not only essential to highly maintain their expertise levels and ensure that their knowledge is up to scratch, but also to catch up and adopt new pedagogical tools, skills and techniques. The advent of the Web 2.0 brought about a plethora of digital tools that teachers have not only struggled to keep track of and investigate the array of tools available, but also have been at a loss of how to productively employ and take advantage of the benefits each of the different tools has to offer. In this paper we present a number of such tools as part of an empirical study to investigate the use of freely available digital tools. This exercise was a spin-off of a project that aims to embrace literacy through digital media as it focuses on re-training educators in the use of digitally supported methods that employ innovative teaching methods. In our conclusions we draw important guidelines on how to optimize the use of such continuous emerging web tools, as well as future work and new potential research directions.