Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Çağıltay K., Kaplan G., Kara Aydemir A. G.
Diğer Özel Kurumlarca Desteklenen Proje, 2020 - 2024
Digital Teachers is a project aimed at making a significant social contribution in Turkey’s digital transformation by improving the digital literacy skills of elementary and middle school teachers. The project set out from the principle that raising the quality of education was directly linked to boosting the competencies of teachers. Accordingly, elementary and middle school teachers working at public schools with a limited information technologies knowledge and skill set were chosen as the target audience of the project. The training program of the Digital Teachers Project aims to help teachers adapt to the digital world effectively and efficiently and attain the conceptual competence and application skills to develop their own digital contents. In order to use digital technologies effectively and efficiently in their education and training processes, teachers need to have digital literacy skills and know how to benefit from such technologies in their education and training processes. The basic pedagogical principle of this project, which focuses on the teachers, is built on “using technology as a leverage in education.” The goal of teaching the teachers how to use the digital technologies is to help them use as leverage such technologies so their students can learn more effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily across all classes independent of the field. Intensive hands-on trainings were designed in line with the “on-the-job training” strategy. Upon completion of their trainings, the teachers could implement what they had learned in the project and develop their own digital materials. The principal gains of this project may be summarized under three main headings:
I. Teachers no longer fear technology The main objective of the Digital Teachers Project is to improve the digital literacy skills of teachers, who have limited or very little knowledge of information technologies. That’s why teachers with the lowest levels of information technologies knowledge and skills were selected to the project. At the beginning of the project, many teachers said that they were unconfident about and scared of using technology. However, during the interviews held with the teachers at the end of the project, almost all of the participants (95%) said they did not fear using technology, their self-confidence improved, and they were now very eager to experience new technologies. Other important outputs of the project included reduced anxiety among teachers about using technology, increased self-confidence, first-hand experience of the benefits of the technology, and in short, elimination of their prejudices against the use of technology. II. Teachers can now produce with technology Designed with the on-the-job training strategy, the project found the opportunity to immediately apply the knowledge and skills they had acquired. Thanks to the application projects given throughout the project, teachers could put to use what they had learned in the project and develop their own digital materials as soon as their training was complete. The evaluation results of these assignments, which allowed the teachers to implement the knowledge and skills they acquired during the project period, are a very important indicator that they achieved their project objectives. It is anticipated that the improvement shown by the teachers here would make a positive contribution in the learning processes of their students. More than 90% of the participants expressed that they had acquired thanks to this project the conceptual competence and application skills required to develop digital class contents and materials. An assessment of the technological competence of the teachers revealed that 95% of the participants reported improvements in their skills to use the Internet and computer technologies, in communication methods unique to online environments, in their ability to identify their own working methods, targets and resources and assess themselves, and in their decision-making mechanism as to when, how long and in which order they would study on a learning mechanism. Furthermore, an assessment of the teachers’ ability to teach using technology showed that more than 80% of the teachers could draw up a lesson plan by incorporating technology, collaborate with teachers and students using technology outside the classroom, integrate mobile technologies into their own classes, and create a blog or wiki to facilitate collaboration between their students. III. Teachers have earned the competences to use technology in their classes In this project, teachers gained the required conceptual knowledge and application skills required for them to use digital technologies in education and training effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily for their students. Teachers were found to have made very importantgains in one of the most critical issues in the digital world –Internet security. 95% of the teachers gained adequate knowledge and skills to use the Internet securely. Thanks to this project, teachers also found the opportunity to improve themselves in e-learning. It is expected that this progress by the teachers would change their teaching methods and strategies during distance education, which would in turn help students learn. The developmental differences in the teacher behaviors originates from the quality of the education provided and the proficiency of the educators who deliver the education. These results demonstrated that the Digital Teachers Project is an applicable and sustainable model for in-service teacher training in our country with both its training program and the pedagogical program it has adopted. Digital Teachers Project is also superior to other teacher training programs as it sets itself apart by both providing teachers with the ability to practice and giving them feedback during practice. The project has contributed significantly in the knowledge, skills and experiences of teachers in using their digital competences and technology in education and training processes. Specialized Middle East Technical University academicians experienced in their respective fields took part in the development of the training program. This ten-week-long training is based on the flipped learning model including synchronous and interactive asynchronous classes and comprised of 5 basic modules. The first module covers the concept of digital citizenship, which is now recognized as a universal framework in our world and Internet security. The second module teaches teachers the principles of visual design and how to use a visual design tool that will help them create designs in line with these principles with a view to supporting their digital literacy skills and competencies. The third module features a training on the psychological foundations of presentation and effective presentation as well as contents that will help teachers create remarkable and impressive presentations. The fourth module contains video and photography creation/editing trainings, which are very critical for digital content creation. The fifth module tackles the issues of critical thinking skills, which constitute the basis of digital literacy skills and how they can use online assessment and evaluation tools to enrich education and training processes, regarding the issue of assessment and evaluation as a very important component of the learning process. In the first term of the project from 16 November 2020 to 5 February 2021, Adana, Ağrı, Ankara, Aydın, Erzurum, Gaziantep, İstanbul, İzmir, Kahramanmaraş and Samsun were selected as the project provinces. A total of 5,217 applications were received from these 10 provinces. The prior knowledge of the teachers was assessed with the multiple-choice questions featured on the application form in order to select the teachers with the lowest levels of knowledge and skills on information technologies in line with the target audience selection criteria of the project, and 1,000 participants who would maximize the benefit for the project. At the project application stage, prior knowledge of the conceptual information and applications featured in the project’s training program were assessed among the teachers selected to the project. Based on the results obtained here, 60% of the teachers selected to the project said they generally needed to develop themselves on digital technologies. An overall assessment of the participant’s prior knowledge of the participants on the concept of digital citizenship revealed that 63% had no knowledge of it while the answer of 94% to the technical question asked about this concept was wrong. When asked to assess their own levels of knowledge concerning the applications featured in the training program of the project, it was found that among the teachers selected to the project, 73% had little or no knowledge of the Canva application, 84% of the Google Slides application, 68% of the Google Forms application, 76% of the Kahoot application, and 91% of the animation development application Powtoon. These results show that the proficiency of the teachers selected to the project is very limited that the selected participants are in need of improvement concerning digital technologies. Of the selected teachers, 76% were classroom teachers with the remaining 24% from other branches. At the end of the 10-week-long project, 716 teachers received certificates of achievement and 146 teachers received certificates of participation. In total, 872 teachers completed their trainings. Despite the increased workload of the teachers due to distance education during the pandemic, they completed the project with a very high participation rate. After the completion of the project, the data received from the teachers showed that almost all of them (95.5%) were very pleased with the 10-week-long trainings. Looking at the collected data on the teacher’s satisfaction with e-learning during the project, they liked the most the training content with an average of 4.79 and they were very satisfied with the education process with an average of 4.58. Looking into the motivations behind the teachers’ participation in the project, it was reported by a great majority that career development (91.5%) and professional advancement (92.7%) and life-long learning (89.4%) was very effective in their participation in the project. Furthermore, delivery of the trainings by the Middle East Technical University was also considered as an important factor that had an impact on the participation of the teachers in the project. These results showed us that when presented with qualified learning opportunities relating to their professional development, teachers are very eager to gain new knowledge, skills and experiences. A look at the results clearly shows that the Digital Teachers Project fulfills a very critical responsibility in terms of equipping our teachers with the knowledge and skills required by the digital age and contributing in the digital transformation of our country concerning teachers’ training. Since the trainings provided under the Digital Teachers Project must be delivered to all teachers under equal terms, the effectiveness of the lessons was assessed using the pretest-posttest study pattern without a control group. Furthermore, the assignments in which the teachers put into practice the knowledge and skills they had obtained at the trainings were included in the impact assessment process of the project. Rubrics were used in order to minimize the subjectivity in the assessment of the assignments of the academicians who took part in the trainings. Furthermore, these rubrics were utilized as a part of the formative assessment. Since the levels of information technologies knowledge and skills of the teachers selected as part of the project were low, it may be argued that the knowledge test average score differences and scale average score differences stemmed from the trainings they received during the project.
technical question asked about this concept was wrong. When asked to assess their own levels of knowledge concerning the applications featured in the training program of the project, it was found that among the teachers selected to the project, 73% had little or no knowledge of the Canva application, 84% of the Google Slides application, 68% of the Google Forms application, 76% of the Kahoot application, and 91% of the animation development application Powtoon. These results show that the proficiency of the teachers selected to the project is very limited that the selected participants are in need of improvement concerning digital technologies. Of the selected teachers, 76% were classroom teachers with the remaining 24% from other branches. At the end of the 10-week-long project, 716 teachers received certificates of achievement and 146 teachers received certificates of participation. In total, 872 teachers completed their trainings. Despite the increased workload of the teachers due to distance education during the pandemic, they completed the project with a very high participation rate. After the completion of the project, the data received from the teachers showed that almost all of them (95.5%) were very pleased with the 10-week-long trainings. Looking at the collected data on the teacher’s satisfaction with e-learning during the project, they liked the most the training content with an average of 4.79 and they were very satisfied with the education process with an average of 4.58. Looking into the motivations behind the teachers’ participation in the project, it was reported by a great majority that career development (91.5%) and professional advancement (92.7%) and life-long learning (89.4%) was very effective in their participation in the project. Furthermore, delivery of the trainings by the Middle East Technical University was also considered as an important factor that had an impact on the participation of the teachers in the project. These results showed us that when presented with qualified learning opportunities relating to their professional development, teachers are very eager to gain new knowledge, skills and experiences. A look at the results clearly shows that the Digital Teachers Project fulfills a very critical responsibility in terms of equipping our teachers with the knowledge and skills required by the digital age and contributing in the digital transformation of our country concerning teachers’ training. Since the trainings provided under the Digital Teachers Project must be delivered to all teachers under equal terms, the effectiveness of the lessons was assessed using the pretest-posttest study pattern without a control group. Furthermore, the assignments in which the teachers put into practice the knowledge and skills they had obtained at the trainings were included in the impact assessment process of the project. Rubrics were used in order to minimize the subjectivity in the assessment of the assignments of the academicians who took part in the trainings. Furthermore, these rubrics were utilized as a part of the formative assessment. Since the levels of information technologies knowledge and skills of the teachers selected as part of the project were low, it may be argued that the knowledge test average score differences and scale average score differences stemmed from the trainings they received during the project.