Teacher’s digital culture: the horizon of Italian participants in a TFA course

This paper focuses on the way Italian participants in a TFA course about Special Educational Needs shape their digital culture. The research was inspired to the Finnish Opeka project and was realized in November 2017 at the University of Foggia (IT). A 55 Likert-items questionnaire was administered by google module and several analyses were run through SPSS. Namely, a Principal Component Analysis was run by looking for four components structuring the participants’ digital culture, according to literature. Then, the factors reliability and their correlation were calculated. Third, the differences among the four groups of participants composing the sample (Kindergarten, Primary school, Middle school, Secondary school) were analysed through MANOVA. Results show that the four factors differ from those proposed by literature, since they are shaped by a focus on rules and the support of the school community. All the factors have a high level of reliability and are correlated with one another, by characterizing a digital culture functioning as a system of reciprocally influencing components. Then, there are differences among groups especially on two factors, since participants get higher scores as the school levels go from the kindergarten to the secondary school.