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.
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).
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,
