Digitally literate teachers in leading edge schools in Norway

Abstract

This paper highlights digitally literate, in‐service teachers in leading edge 1 1. Leading edge schools are upper secondary schools that have worked continuously and systematically with ICT implementation over several years. All the teachers have their own laptops, as do a large proportion of the students. These are connected to the Internet via a wireless connection. schools in Norway and focuses on how they, in their professional development, adapt digital literacy. Today we find a consensus among policy‐makers, researchers, teacher‐educators and teachers that digital literacy must be given high priority and needs to be explored more deeply in our upper secondary schools. Therefore, digital literacy has become the fifth basic competence in the new curriculum and obligatory for all subjects at all stages. Despite this consensus and the increased status of information and communication technologies (ICT), previous ICT efforts have revealed that implementation of ICT has been more strongly anchored rhetorically and ideologically than in practice. Consequently, this paper focuses on whether we, in the new educational reform The Knowledge Promotion (Undervisnings og forskningsdepartementet, 2006 Undervisnings og Forskningsdepartementet [Ministry of Education and Research. 2006. Læreplan for den 13‐årige grunnopplæringen [The National Curriculum for Primary Education], Oslo: Statens Forvaltningsteneste. [Google Scholar]), are entering a time of upheaval within this area, at a time when in‐service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge manages to integrate digital literacy as part of their professional development. The paper analyses how teachers have become digitally literate, what they actually do in their professional development and how the school organization manages (or not) to create a fertile ground to achieve mandatory ICT in the new curriculum. In this analysis, a new developed digital literacy model is presented and used as a lens to examine teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge.