Developing digital competence in preschool education: training future early childhood educators

Abstract

The article discusses the origins of digital competence, explains its content and components for early childhood educators. We define a preschooler's digital competence as a child's awareness of using information and communication technologies, as well as digital tools, to solve educational, cognitive, and everyday tasks. It also describes the tasks, functions, and principles for designing the digital educational environment of a modern school. The components and resources of the digital environment are outlined. The study results highlight the importance of targeted and systematic efforts to enhance and prepare for fostering digital competence in children by future educators. The goal of the formative stage was to justify and test the effectiveness of the developed teaching conditions. The final stage aims to assess the levels of readiness of future educators to promote digital competence in preschool children. The diagnostic results show positive changes in all criteria among students in the experimental group, confirming the effectiveness of the teaching conditions that were developed and put into practice.