Preparing students for digital citizenship is one core commission of today’s schooling. In-service teachers, as well as pre-service teachers and teacher educators have a key role in creating future education. Anyhow, research on the use of technology among teachers has traditionally concentrated mainly on technical aspects. Research concentrating solely on teachers’ perceived knowhow on technology’s pedagogical use has been somewhat faint.

This research is part of a nation-wide OpenDigi -a project carried out in teacher education departments in five Finnish universities. Local and national learning communities of the OpenDigi project are created for joint learning and teaching projects of pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators in order to enhance their professional know-how in supporting students’ and teachers’ active learning and technological pedagogical know-how. On the one hand, the aim is to enhance communication between teacher educators and teachers working at the school in order to apply research-based knowledge on the actions done during the project. On the other hand, the teacher educators get familiar with the educational innovations and practices of the schools.

The research aims to answer following questions: a) how is the perceived technological-pedagogical knowhow amongst in-service and pre-service teachers and teacher educators and b) what kind of differences exist between aforesaid teacher groups’ in terms of perceived TPK -knowhow? As the Finnish core curriculum guidelines include seven cross-disciplinary themes one aim of this study is c) to investigate how high these are valued generally and d) specifically, how confident the teachers are about their skills and knowledge to use ICT to support teaching and learning in these areas. Also, it will be interesting to investigate in e) which cross-disciplinary area the use of ICT is seen as the most useful learning tool?

The theoretical background in this study is derived from technological-pedagogical-content knowledge  -model (TPACK, Koehler & Mishra, 2006). TPACK defines three core knowledge areas (technological knowledge TK, pedagogical knowledge PK and content knowledge CK) that are essential in order to execute successful and effective teaching with technology. As these core knowledge areas intersect, four more areas (technological-pedagogical knowledge TPK, technological content knowledge TCK, pedagogical content knowledge PK and technological-pedagogical-content knowledge TPACK) are composed. As technology is understood as digital technologies here, we see TPK as digipedagogical knowledge. Following that the research scrutinizes teachers’ self-assessed knowhow on the operationalizing of the curriculum as conducting actual teaching in practice, we call our research focus as TPK-knowhow.

The data is collected in two parts: the first data collection was conducted in 2018 before the OpenDigi interventions. The post-activity survey for the follow up of the data collection is to be conducted in March-May 2019. The largest target group is the pre-service teachers (N=123), but the teacher educators (N=83) and in-service teachers (N=33) are also included. A technological-pedagogical-content knowledge (TPACK) -related questionnaire is operationalized to explore participating teachers’ perceived TPK-knowhow and changes in it after taking part in OpenDigi-interventions. Survey is derived from the measurement instruments aiming to investigate TPACK among pre-service teachers (e.g. Schmidt et al., 2009; Valtonen et al. 2017). The closer focus will be on the development of technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK), so in this study we experiment operationalizing TPACK’s two core areas PK and TK, and their intersect TPK, in order to create a self-assessment survey, which is scalable for several teacher groups and elicits their perceived knowhow on pedagogy related to technology and vice versa. Focusing only on TPK is necessary because of participating in-service and pre-service teachers present several school levels (from 1st to 9th grade in elementary schools) including class teachers and subject teachers in varying disciplines, as well teacher educators from the universities present several disciplines. Survey data is analyzed statistically by SPSS 24 with descriptives and correlation analysis.

The preliminary results based on the first survey (pre-activity) indicates that the developed survey offers a scalable way to scrutinize different teacher groups’ self-assessed TPK-knowhow. Preliminary results suggest that teachers educators are most confident teacher group on their general TPK -knowhow. Documentation of students’ learning processes was found as the area where all teacher groups were most confident to utilize ICT. In-service teachers reported the lowest confidence on the use of ICT for supporting students’ peer assessment when pre-service teachers and teacher educators evaluated the use of ICT to support students’ individualization with the lowest scores. All the teacher groups showed quite modest assessments on their TPK -knowhow as none of the means of the items (n=15) measured reached the value given for the good know-how. This seems particularly interesting when it is known that in European scale educators are found to have the most modest technological problem-solving skills when compared to other academically trained professionals (Hämäläinen et al., 2019). Preliminary results indicate that statistical significances were not found between teacher groups on how cross-disciplinary themes are valued in general. On these areas, teachers reported their TPK-knowhow to be somewhat modest too, as all the means of the values given remained below 4, “Good knowhow”. Further analysis of the cross-disciplinary themes and their possible relations with other areas questioned are under construction and to be delivered in february 2019 and presented in September 2019. In the future, one of the aims of is also to investigate in which phase and for which group the collaborative work with schools and ICT use could have a positive impact on teacher students’ technological pedagogical knowledge.

Finnish National Board of Education. (2014). Perusopetuksen opetussuunnitelman perusteet 2014 [National Core Curriculum of Basic Education 2004]. Retrieved January 1, 2018, from http://www.oph.fi/download/163777_perusopetuksen_opetussuunnitelman_perusteet_2014.pdf Hämäläinen, R. (2019). What makes the difference – PIAAC as a resource for understanding the problem-solving skills of Europe's higher-education adults. Computers & Education, 129, pp. 27-36. Koehler, J. & Mishra, P. (2006) Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. The Teachers College Record, 2006, 108, 6, 1017-1054. Schmidt, D.A.; Baran, E.; Thompson, A.D.; Mishra, P.; Koehler, M.J.; Shin, T.S., (2009). Technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) the development and validation of an assessment instrument for preservice teachers. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 2009, 42, 2, 123-149 Valtonen, T., Sointu, E., Kukkonen, J., Kontkanen, S., Lambert, M. C., & Mäkitalo-Siegl, K. (2017). TPACK updated to measure pre-service teachers' twenty-first-century skills. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 33(3).