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ABSTRACT

Digital competence has become a new type of literacy that significantly impacts on people’s lives, as it is paramount to their social and occupational integration. In educational institutions, teachers play a major role in developing the digital skills of their students. This study aims to determine the key elements of teacher training in the use of innovative technologies and methodologies with a view to providing alternatives to improve the educational process. The objective is to overcome deficiencies in the training of teachers in new technologies and innovative methodologies. A qualitative study based on interview data is used in two phases. For the first phase research, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight international education experts from various fields on how best to train teachers. The second phase research involved a text mining analysis of the interview transcripts based on sentiment analysis and word counts using the advanced R statistical programming language. The second phase research was conducted using the R statistical programming language. The interview transcripts were analysed using sentiment analysis and a word cloud. The results reveal that teacher education should be practice-focused and supervised by senior teachers with the aid of students and heads of schools. Moreover, standards should be set to monitor the digital competence of teachers, who should be trained on an ongoing basis to keep them up to date in the use of digital technologies.

Keywords: teacher education, teacher training, educational technology, educational innovation, pre-service education