Educational research has increasingly drawn attention to teachers’ professional digital competence.Various theoretical and methodological perspectives involving a plethora of terms are used to investigate teachers’ competences in relation to technology-based teaching. The concept of teachers’ professional digital competence still appears to be ambiguous and elusive. This literature overview aims to scrutinise if, and how the concepts addressing teachers’ professional digital competence are defined or conceptualised in research. In the publications retrieved from the search in educational databases, we found that the concept of teachers’ professional digital competence, or related concepts, was frequently mentioned in abstracts, keywords and full texts, but to a large extent, it was rarely described in detail. In our final corpus of 18 publications, we could distinguish seven recurring aspects of teachers’ professional digital competence; 1) technological competence, 2) content knowledge, 3) attitudes to technology use, 4) pedagogical competence, 5) cultural awareness, 6) critical approach and 7) professional engagement, with the technological and pedagogical competences as the most prominent. Inspired by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, these aspects are analysed as operating within microsystems of individual teachers and within meso- and macrosystems of interactive teachers in interplay with the situated classroom contexts and on larger societal systems.

This structured review examined (academic) publications on flipped or inverted classrooms based on all Scopus database (n = 530) references available until mid-June 2016. The flipped or inverted classroom approach has gained widespread attention during the latest decade and is based on the idea of improving student learning by prepared self-studies via technology-based resources (‘flips’) followed by high-quality, in-class teaching and learning activities. However, only a few attempts have been made to review the knowledge of the field of interest more systematically. This article seeks to address this problem and investigates what constitutes the research on flipped classrooms and, in particular, to examine the knowledge contributions with the field so far in relation to the wider research topic of educational technology. This review found that the current state of flipped classrooms as a field of interest is growing fast, with a slight conference preference and a focus on higher education and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) area contributions, with the US as the predominant geographical context. It is concluded that studies on flipped classrooms are dominated by studies in higher education sector and are relatively local in character. The research tends not to interact beyond the two clusters of general education/educational technology and subject-specific areas. This implies that knowledge contributions related to the flipped classroom approach are relatively siloed and fragmented and have yet to stabilise. Academically and socially, the research is quite scattered, and only local evidence and experiences are available. The knowledge contributions within this field of interest seem to be anecdotal rather than systematically researched. To a large extent, the research lacks anchoring in, for example, learning theory or instructional design known from educational technology traditions and which would have helped much of the flipped classroom research to examine aspects of the flipped classroom approach more fully.

United Nations of Education Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO’s) founding statements about environmental education (EE) in the 1970s positioned it as a multidisciplinary field of inquiry. When enacted as such, it challenges traditional ways of organising secondary school education by academic subject areas. Equally, according to UNESCO, EE requires various forms of integrated and project-based teaching and learning approaches. These can involve hands-on experimentation alongside the retrieval and critical analysis of information from diverse sources and perspectives, and with different qualities and statuses. Multidisciplinary and knowledge engagement challenges are key considerations for an EE curriculum designed to harness information and communication technologies (ICT) to support and enhance student learning, which also challenge traditional instructional priorities that for example are largely based on textbooks. This review summarises research that has sought to integrate ICT and digital tools in EE. A key finding is that while there is a rich variety of such tools and applications available, there is far less research on their fit with and implications for student learning. The review calls for further studies that will provide models of productive forms of teaching and learning that harness ICT resources, particularly in developing the goals and methodologies of EE in the twenty-first century.