During the last decade, large sums of money were invested in many countries to foster the use of ICT in education. In various catalogues, digital competence was named as a 21st century key competence (e.g. World Bank, 2003; European Council, 2006). The expectations were that (1) schools would equip their students with ICT skills, (2) schools would bridge the digital divide and that (3) ICT would make teaching and learning more effective (OECD, 2010).

Although the use of ICT in European schools is still fairly low, it did increase over the last ten years (OECD, 2011). However, ICT is used much more often at home than at school. At the same time, there are large differences in ICT use between the European countries, and within the countries, there are differences in ICT use which are related to students’ socio-economic backgrounds. This is an issue that is discussed by Kerstin Drossel and her colleagues from Germany in their contribution. Their somewhat paradoxical finding is that the absence of access to computer and Internet is an indicator of low socio-economic status of students’ families, while at the same time, students with this background who do have access to computer and Internet use these digital devices much more frequently than students from better socio-economic background.

Notwithstanding these problems in ICT use, there is at least some evidence that using ICT may support students in their learning activities. Stefanie Hillen reports on the use of digital tools to support learning. Elaboration of information is an important aspect of learning and digital tools may support elaboration by facilitating visualization of the information to be acquired. In her contribution, she will report on an empirical study she did on the use of digital tools with bachelor students of her university.

During the last two decades, developments in ICT have made the Internet not only a rich source of information on practically any topic, they also have made the Internet interactive thus allowing learners to communicate with each other very easily. The Internet as a communication platform is therefore becoming increasingly important in teaching and learning. Patricia Fidalgo and her colleague explored opinions of students who had taken an online course on online teaching and who had participated in the accompanying online discussion forum. They wanted to know what their students thought about different strategies in online discussions and how these strategies compared to those discussed in the literature.

European Council. (2006). Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning. Retrieved from http://eurlex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2006:394:0010:0018:en:PDF.

OECD. (2010). Are the new Millennium learners making the grade? Technology use and educational performance in PISA. Paris: Centre for Educational Research and Innovation.

OECD. (2011). PISA 2009 Results: Students on Line: Digital Technologies and Performance (Volume VI). Paris: OECD.

World Bank. (2003). Lifelong Learning in the Global Knowledge Economy: Challenges for Developing Countries. Washington DC: The World Bank.