What is it about?
The article looks at how well teachers are prepared to use digital technologies in their everyday teaching and why this matters for students’ learning. It reviews recent research from different countries to see what skills teachers already have, what difficulties they face, and what kind of training helps them improve. In simple terms, it asks: Are teachers ready for today’s digital classrooms, what is missing, and what should schools and governments do to support them better?
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Why is it important?
This work is timely because it brings together the most recent studies (2020–2024) carried out after the COVID‑19 pandemic and during the rapid spread of AI tools, precisely when schools are under strong pressure to “go digital” but many teachers still feel underprepared. Its uniqueness lies in offering a clear, up‑to‑date picture of where teachers stand worldwide in terms of digital skills, which countries and levels are leading or lagging, and which training approaches seem most promising, instead of focusing on a single context or case. By highlighting concrete gaps between what teachers need and what current training and policies provide, this review can inform better professional development programs, more realistic expectations about technology use in classrooms, and more targeted future research, making it especially relevant for decision‑makers, school leaders, and teacher educators.
Perspectives
From my perspective as co‑author, this publication has been a powerful opportunity to pause and look critically at how we are really supporting teachers in the process of digital transformation. Bringing together evidence from different countries and educational levels has deepened my conviction that digital competence must be addressed not only as a technical issue, but as a core element of teachers’ professional identity and working conditions. Working on this review has also strengthened collaboration with colleagues and research networks interested in teacher training, AI and educational innovation, opening new projects aimed at designing more contextualized, realistic and ethically grounded training proposals for schools and universities.
Carlos Hervás Gómez
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Teacher digital competence: Keys for an educational future through a systematic review, Contemporary Educational Technology, April 2025, Bastas Publications,
DOI: 10.30935/cedtech/16168.
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