Digital competence of upper secondary school teachers in Havana

Abstract

Technological changes in society have made it necessary to transform various sectors. The educational sphere of the 21st century requires the incorporation of digital technologies into teaching and learning processes. In the Cuban context, the incorporation of technologies into education has been a growing objective. Therefore, evaluating teachers' digital competence has become a fundamental task. The research has a representative sample of upper secondary school teachers in Havana, covering the following areas of teaching: pedagogy, professional technical education, and pre-university education. The data were collected using the Digital Competence Scale for Teachers proposed by García (2023), with a quantitative approach. This was done in order to characterize teachers' digital competence and compare it with other sociodemographic or contextual variables. The study proposes a detailed theoretical review in a national context where this topic has been vaguely studied. It also provides useful and novel results. In this sense, it was found that the five competency areas studied indicate that upper secondary school teachers in Havana have a second-level (basic) competency level. Furthermore, gender does not have a significant influence on any of the competencies studied, while the type of teaching and work experience do influence some of them. Finally, age, access to digital devices and resources, and the frequency of social media use condition the development of various digital teaching competencies.