Apr 23, 2024
New continuing education platform: Saxony's teachers attend digital classes
The online continuing education course "Teaching with digital media in Saxony" is the result of a project supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), which was carried out for three years at the Center for Open Digital Innovation and Participation (CODIP) at TUD Dresden University of Technology. During this period, teachers in Saxony actively contributed their experiences and requirements and therefore played a key role in shaping the course. You can now access the course via the OPAL school learning platform: The URL https://undime.de takes you directly to the course.
The project "Teaching with digital media in Saxony," also referred to using the acronym "UndiMeS," was created to promote the integration of digital media in schools in Saxony. We would now like to present the results of this online course, which originally started in 2020. The course is aimed at teachers, school administrators and educational institutions.
"In order to understand how digitally supported learning works and to be able to integrate it effectively into their lessons, teachers need to be trained accordingly," explains Prof. Thomas Köhler, Director of CODIP. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed major deficits with regard to teachers’ media skills. "With this course, we give teachers the opportunity to develop and deepen their media skills, and at the same time we empower them to develop their own teaching concepts and apply them in the classroom."
In order to make the training more practical, the UndiMeS research team conducted extensive surveys with teachers to determine their wants and needs with regard to training. In addition, they received actionable feedback by testing the individual content with student teachers from TU Dresden and Leipzig University.
What is unique about the course is that the content is neither subject-specific nor school-specific, but addresses the topic of media literacy across the board and encourages cooperation between teachers. The content is spread over 180 micro-learning units, each of which takes around ten minutes. This means that teachers can complete the training at any time and at their own pace.
Initially, the service will be available to teachers in Saxony, who simply need to register on the OPAL school learning platform. By the end of 2024, the service should be accessible by teachers nationwide.