Eye-tracking glasses for improving teacher education: the e-Teach project

This paper is about “Improvement of teaching techniques by eye tracking in technology enhanced classrooms” (e-Teach), an innovative project funded by the Erasmus Plus Programme (KA2 - Strategic Partnership in the field of School Education). The project aims to study teachers’ eye movements in real teaching situation using eye-tracking glasses and compares the teachers’ use of digital technologies between novices and experts teaching the same school subject. The purpose of this study was to provide indicators of skill gaps between novices and experts which can be addressed appropriately with highly targeted teacher education. The first part of the paper reviews recent developments in conceptual frameworks for digital competence and in digital competence descriptors. The second part describes the project status, the methods and its phases. In conclusion, the paper gives a brief overview of initial findings of ongoing research, focusing largely on the Italian experience, and development tasks for the next project phases. The initial findings suggest that teachers valued the benefits of using digital technologies in classrooms and recognized the necessity of professional development. They also provided specific insights for the purpose of developing an online course for teacher education in four languages: English, Turkish, Italian and Lithuanian.