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Digital skills are understood as the knowledge and skills necessary for using technologies to strengthen teaching pedagogy and student learning and facilitate their use in a critical, creative, and safe way, favoring flexible and autonomous learning. Although Covid-19 led us to the obligation to turn to technology regardless of the levels of mastery applied to education by teachers, also it showed us that even in post-pandemic education, digital skills are essential to self-manage a lifelong education.
The pandemic offers an opportunity to rethink the importance of digital teaching skills and determine a sustainable definition, evaluation, and training strategy that adapts to a changing technological ecosystem. It implies that teachers have the ability not only to use technological equipment appropriately and comprehensively but also to use it as an instrument to advance their pedagogy and to be able to make the right decisions about when and how to use it to maximize student achievement. At the same time, it is a priority to develop and strengthen in-service training programs that improve digital and technological competencies and develop pedagogical skills for virtual, in-person, and hybrid education modalities. In this transformation process, instruments must also be available to assess digital skills, and using their results is critical to making informed decisions for improvement.
This compendium put forward by the Latin American Coalition for Teaching Excellence aims to group initiatives that have strengthened teachers’ digital skills in Latin America. Specifically, it addresses the digital competency frameworks that exist in the region, teacher training experiences, and the evaluation processes implemented to measure progress in digital teaching skills. The identification of the 14 initiatives in three thematic areas was achieved thanks to the design and dissemination of an online survey. For its dissemination, the Latin American Coalition for Teaching Excellence, the participants of the Working Group on Technology and Innovation in Education of the Inter-American Dialogue, and their respective networks participated.
