Digital Competencies in the Context of Preschool Music Education

Abstract

Given the digitalization of modern society and the way a child acquires musical experiences, practitioners are expected to apply various media in everyday educational praxis. The theoretical framework of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) is an approach that connects the knowledge of educators with Information and Communications Technology (ICT), concurrently developing technology-supported pedagogical knowledge and integration of technology into education. The paper aims to investigate educators’ self-assessment of their digital competencies and their implementation in musical activities with preschool children. The respondents are full-time and part-time graduate students of the Early Childhood and Preschool Education study program from faculties of teacher education in Croatia. The obtained results indicate that 91,1 % of respondents didn’t have any formal ICT education while 59,5 % didn’t have any additional type of music education except during their studies. Nevertheless, the greatest knowledge participants have shown on the competencies for using digital tools (CFUDT) scale succeeded by a technological knowledge (TK) scale of the adapted TPACK-TCCMA survey, thus the respondents rated their digital and ICT competencies exceedingly high unlike music and pedagogical competencies. Considering the results obtained, it can be concluded that additional attention should be given to the development of digital, music, and pedagogical competencies during studies that will be applicable in both music and other areas of education.

Science Learning in Answering Digital Competency Needs of Preservice Math and Science Teachers in the STEM Context

“…Exploring further into the implementation of the DigComp framework at educational institutions, to the best of our knowledge, there have been limited studies that map the potential digital competencies of pre-service teachers at a national level with diverse respondents and significant sample size. Previous research on digital competency has been more focused on partial aspects, such as the application of specific digital competencies in a particular field (Blaženka, 2022), measuring the application of DigComp areas for teachers and students (Kuzminska et al, 2018), or examining the correlation factors between DigComp areas (Falloon, 2020). Therefore, further investigation is still required to measure the level of digital competency among pre-service teachers (in the teacher preparation phase) from various academic departments (STEM context) with a broader scope of research subjects at the national level, considering different demographic factors, to enable quantitative generalization of the findings.…”