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professional engagementThe first area of the DigCompEdu – professional engagement – addresses the need to use digital technologies for communication, collaboration and interaction with colleagues, learners and parents, and to seek out digital opportunities for one’s individual and continuous professional development (cf. Redecker 2017: 16; 19; 33–41). Four sub-dimensions are included:

 Organizational communication: Teachers use digital technologies for communicative purposes within their institution (i.e. with colleagues and learners) and outside of it (e.g. with parents and other third parties); for example, teachers use e-mail or virtual learning environments to provide learning resources or communicate appointments or feedback.

 Professional collaboration: Teachers employ digital technologies to collaborate with other teachers in order to exchange valuable knowledge and experience, and thus, to innovate pedagogic practices within professional teams, e.g. by developing a new project in a collaborative cloud environment.

 Reflective practice: This dimension does not include digital technologies as such, but adds a critical and reflective component in that teachers are asked to constantly reflect on and, as a result, develop further their digital practices, both individually and collectively, e.g. by asking more advanced teachers for help or signing up for a training course.

 Digital continuous professional development (CPD): Teachers seek out digital opportunities for their ongoing and lifelong professional development, e.g. to use the internet to learn about new teaching methods and content.

While the first, second and third sub-dimension function on a general level, CPD is clearly an area that can best be specified for foreign language education, as is illustrated in the example below. In terms of the progression model, a Newcomer would only rarely use digital technologies, whereas an Integrator would be good at making effective digital choices and exchanging digital expertise with peers. Pioneers would then innovate and redesign whole institutional practices and group activities with their accumulated digital experience.

Digital resources for CPD of foreign language teachers

Video tutorials: Subscribe to YouTube channels like Moodle or Blackboard Inc., or work with the YouTube series of ‘Teaching Tips’ by International House World Organisation where esteemed global teacher trainers share their expertise.

Webinars: Global organizations such as the IATEFL frequently offer new webinars on ELT (www.iatefl.org/events).

Online communities: Many professional organizations offer participation in online communities, e.g. the TESOL Communities of Practice, MELTA, or ELTABB. Less formal grassroots movements of ELT teachers can be found on Facebook, often with a specific theme in mind, e.g. the public group ELT Footprint for bringing environmental awareness into teaching (https://www.facebook.com/groups/eltfootprint).

digital resourcesIn the second domain of ‘Digital Resources’, teachers become increasingly competent at navigating the diversity of digital resources and technologies to make informed choices that benefit their learner groups and learning objectives, and that match their personal teaching styles. Three components are included, each of which is made relevant here for foreign language education (cf. Redecker 2017: 20, 43–49):

 Selecting digital resources: Teachers identify and select available digital resources and plan their use while keeping a suitable match with their learners, methods and objectives in mind. For example, learners could use the hashtag #blacklivesmatter to compile information on how the virulent topic of racial violence and discrimination in the USA is negotiated in social media such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

 Creating and modifying digital resources: With this sub-dimension, teachers are additionally encouraged to create their own digital resources, or modify existing openly-licensed resources (also jointly in a team), e.g. by using tools such as Padlet to create a digital collage board about the long-standing racial divide in the U.S., or to provide a resource for vocabulary enrichment (including images, text, and audio) to facilitate the conversation about this issue.

 Managing, protecting and sharing digital resources: This sub-dimension includes efficient management of digital resources (e.g. on a learning platform) and dealing sensitively with privacy protection, copyright rules and personal data (e.g. when attributing open-license image rights properly in a self-made explainer video on slavery and colonialism in American history).

While the A1/A2 levels of this area entail basic operations such as making a list of promising resources for future use, creating a worksheet using Office software or sharing a resource in an e-mail attachment, the B levels add further complexity in view of evaluating the quality of a new resource, managing a learning platform such as Moodle for a class, or combining various interactive elements into a learning activity. Ultimately, the C2 level turns teachers into Pioneers that guide other colleagues or set up sophisticated and annotated learning repositories for their schools (cf. also Lütge, Merse, Su 2019).

Choosing TEFL resources

One example of self-made educational resources are explainer videos, which teachers can use to move instructions into learners’ independent learning phases at home, or to make it easier for learners to revisit difficult content in this recorded form whenever they feel the need to do so. These videos are often used in a blended-learning environment, where students learn at least partially through online learning and interact with their peers and teachers face-to-face (cf. Ullmann 2018). Suitable tools include:

www.mysimpleshow.com: A user-friendly tool to create dynamic explainer videos in four steps: draft, write, visualize and finalize;

www.lumen5.com: This tool, normally intended for marketing purposes, can also be used by teachers to convert content into videos, e.g. by pasting a website link or new text; the tool pulls text and images into a video board, where they can be edited further;

Camtasia: This fee-based and more elaborate software allows for screen-casting and video-editing, e.g. for adding an explainer voice-over to a deck of presentation slides.

teaching and learningWhereas the second domain is more concerned with selecting and preparing digital resources, the domain of ‘teaching and learning’ moves to implementing digital technologies in teaching practice and learning processes. In a way, this area lies at the heart of the whole DigCompEdu framework, which ultimately aims at enhancing education for the benefit of all learners, which includes a shift of focus from teacher-led to more learner-centered processes (cf. Redecker 2017: 20–21; 51–59). On a fine-grained level, this competence area is spread out against four sub-dimensions:

 Teaching: In this key dimension, teachers integrate digital devices and resources to create effective teaching interventions as part of a carefully orchestrated digital strategy and classroom structure. For example, the teacher could show a short film clip on an interactive whiteboard; then learners analyze a set of film stills for cinematographic devices on a tablet device so that they can annotate the stills with their results, and display their annotated stills back on the whiteboard for presentation and discussion with the whole class.

 Guidance: Here, teachers enhance learner-teacher interaction to offer support to learners with digital technologies, for example, when responding to questions on a homework assignment in a Q&A section on the online class platform, or when monitoring progress on a written essay in a collaborative writing environment such as Etherpad or GoogleDocs.

 Collaborative learning: Teachers support learners in collaborating, communicating and creating knowledge with each other, e.g. when they create an entry for a class wiki on a culture-related topic such as food while using chat or video conferencing to negotiate the details; or when they give each other peer feedback on essays and papers with the help of an online tool such as Peerceptiv.

 Self-regulated learning: Here, teachers help learners to improve their learner autonomy and to reflect on their own learning process, e.g. when teachers enable learners to use a digital portfolio in which they plan their next learning steps, and document their results and reflections through texts, voice recordings, or videos.

In the progression scale, teachers move forward when they increasingly experiment with new formats and become experienced with a wide digital toolkit to offer interaction and guidance and to facilitate both collaborative and independent work. A Pioneer (C2) does not only manage online learning sessions and interactions, but also innovates teaching strategies by developing new pedagogic methods and adjusting them to their context following critical self-reflection. One example could be to experiment with the flipped classroom (FC), a relatively new teaching approach which has traditional face-to-face information transmission occur online and that renders it possible for learners and teachers to engage more in active and collaborative in-class tasks (cf. Ullmann 2018; Carbaugh & Doubet 2016).

assessmentWithin the area of assessment, digitally competent teachers know how to use suitable digital technologies to enhance (but not to replace) existing assessment strategies, and to create or facilitate innovative assessment approaches, by engaging the following sub-dimensions that are connected in a cascade of interventions:

 Assessment strategies: Within this aspect, teachers seek to improve the diversity of suitable assessment formats with digital technologies, e.g. by using classroom response systems for grammar and vocabulary testing, or by using digital test environments for diagnosis that are often provided by publishers of print coursebooks.

 Analyzing evidence: Closely linked to the sub-dimension above, teachers use digital technologies to generate, select, analyze and interpret data on learners’ progress and performance, with a view to shaping future learning and teaching interventions.

 Feedback and planning: Here, teachers provide targeted feedback to learners based on the evidence generated by digital technologies. For example, a teacher can provide recorded audio-feedback on a learner product (such as a writing assignment), and point out pathways for improvement (such as the more careful use of online dictionaries, or a better double-checking of information found online).

In terms of assessment strategies, for instance, an Expert (B2) teacher is able to use a range of digital tools for formative assessment strategically both in and out of the classroom, while Leaders (C1) would be more aware of the benefits and drawbacks of digital and non-digital assessment formats and adapt their strategies accordingly through critical reflection. On the A level, teachers make use of simpler data collections, e.g. by collecting oral grades in a digital spreadsheet over a school term to show learners their individual development.

Assessment tools

Digital quizzes, voting tools and classroom response systems: Socrative, Quizizz, Poll Everywhere, The Answer Pad, Kahoot!

Digital portfolios: Seesaw, Bulb, Padlet, or personalized sections within the virtual learning environment or management system a class is using.

empowering learnersThe area of empowering learners addresses the potential of digital technologies to enhance learner-centered pedagogies that involve learners equally and deeply in the learning process. In particular, this area encourages teachers to work on central educational challenges such as inclusion and more personalized and differentiated teaching. In a way, it can be said that this area develops a specification of the broader areas of digital resources and of teaching and learning (Redecker 2017: 22; 70–75). Sub-dimensions of learner empowerment include:

 Accessibility and inclusion: With this competence, teachers ensure that all learners have access to the digital resources in use, in particular learners with special needs and different abilities. This includes, first of all, to consider digital resources that can be accessed by all depending on available technological equipment, and to create or modify learning resources with special needs in mind. This also covers the use of assistive technologies, e.g. by using recorded audio rather than textual task instructions, or by changing design principles concerning font, size and color in worksheets for learners with visual impairments.

 Differentiation and personalization: Here, teachers implement differentiation strategies according to learner levels and needs and design individual learning pathways through digital technologies (e.g. by practicing dialogues at different difficulty levels with the tool Voki where learners speak through avatars, by using online quizzes with different speeds, by developing individual work plans in digital portfolios, or by making available additional tasks in a virtual learning environment that address overachievers).

 Actively engaging learners makes teachers develop digital strategies for increasing motivation, deep thinking and creative expression in hands-on activities, in particular to involve learners in a subject-specific issue. This sub-dimension includes, for example, to design multi-sensory technologies to visualize and explain new content, to use technologies in intensive research cycles to solve a problem (e.g. on the real use of water in food production), or to present working results through creative expression, e.g. a poem as a digital story.

In terms of the competent progression in this field, teachers can, for example, develop from an initial A1-A2 curiosity in achieving inclusion and involvement digitally (e.g. through the basic use of digital animations or videos for hands-on explanations), to creating tailor-made digital resources to assist special needs (B2), to innovating a school’s set of digital strategies for inclusion and differentiation (C2).

Suitable tools for empowering learners – Taking stock

Identify digital resources and technologies that you consider helpful to actively engage learners and to cater for inclusion and differentiation needs. Go through the suggestions presented in this article and re-evaluate them from the perspective of learner empowerment, or research suitable tools yourself, e.g. by using the inventory of ICT tools and open educational resources provided by the European Centre of Modern Languages (https://www.ecml.at/Resources/InventoryofICTtools/tabid/1906/language/en-GB/Default.aspx). In what ways can the tools you have selected create more learner-centered classroom activities and methodologies?

facilitating learners’ digital competenceThe last area can be understood as the culmination of all previous competence domains of educators, when teachers apply their digital know-how to fostering the digital competence of learners (Redecker 2017: 23; 77–87). Within this shift of focus to learners, teachers receive a central role in view of the following five sub-dimensions:

 Information and media literacy: Teachers encourage learners to articulate a concrete information need, then proceed to searching, organizing, storing and analyzing new information, and finally, to evaluate the credibility and reliability of information and its sources. For language learning, learners could work with an online language databank such as the British National Corpus to research collocations. For cultural and global learning, learners could collate different opinions and perspectives on a sustainability issue such as palm oil production.

 Digital communication and collaboration: Here, teachers prepare tasks that require learners to use digital technologies for communication, collaboration and civic participation effectively and responsibly, including, for example, the co-construction of knowledge, awareness of behavioral norms in online worlds, and understanding appropriate digital communication means. For example, learners could design a webinar with an author of the book they are reading, moving from the invitation via e-mail, to the joint collection of suitable questions, to welcoming the guest and hosting the event via a video-conferencing tool such as Zoom.

 Digital content creation: Within this dimension, teachers encourage learners to create learning outcomes and products in digital ways, e.g. by using presentation technologies such as Prezi, or by handing in a working result as a video. The issue of knowing copyright and licensing rules is covered here, too.

 Responsible use: Here, teachers aim at equipping learners with a positive attitude towards digital technologies and ensuring that learners know how to manage their physical, psychological and social well-being, e.g. in view of privacy issues, sharing personal information on social media platforms, or protection from cyberbullying. Such concerns could be turned into relevant project work in which learners move from gaining knowledge of an issue to concrete implementations.

 Problem-solving: Within this dimension, teachers invest continuous efforts to help learners identify and solve technical problems, update their digital competence with regard to new arrivals in the technological and digital world, or transfer available knowledge to new situations. For foreign language education, it makes sense to negotiate and perform such tasks in the foreign language through providing appropriate language (e.g. ‘My device is not working properly.’ – ‘Maybe the batteries need recharging?’ – ‘Oh yes, that is the problem. Thank you.’).

Regarding information literacy, for example, learners may be good at finding information quickly but they need assistance in terms of how to assess the reliability of the sources of information and how to synthesize information from them. An Integrator (B1) can implement learning activities fostering this competence. A more strategic educator like an Expert (B2) would use a variety of pedagogic strategies to help learners combine information more critically and meaningfully, and more importantly, teach them how to quote sources in an appropriate way.

digital competence: a life-long challenge for teachersAdmittedly, reading about the digital competence of educators in such a condensed way provides a heavyweight of information that needs to be processed and digested. Therefore, it might be advisable to understand this framework as an opportunity for continuous development – rather than the expectation that all of the 22 sub-dimensions of the six competence areas need to be fully developed all at once. Also, it needs to be said that not all teachers necessarily start at the lowest A1 level, in particular because they might bring many existing skills to their profession which can be fitted into the DigCompEdu framework. Also, not all teachers need to progress up to the C2 level, since this level is primarily concerned with transforming and innovating whole institutions, rather than individual classrooms and learner groups. While for practicing teachers the DigCompEdu can be a source for in-service training to stay up-to-date, pre-service teachers are faced with the challenge of acquiring digital competence already during their teacher education. To shed light on this particular situation, the following section presents how the DigCompEdu framework was explored with an empirical study on future teachers’ digital expertise and attitudes towards digital education. Another issue that may be raised and that we cannot follow any further here would lead to the question whether there may not only be progress but also regressing tendencies, or in other words, whether we are speaking about a necessarily unidirectional development or whether reverse tendencies might be possible, too.