Teachers must first acquire the necessary media literacy skills, strategies, dispositions, and pedagogy to impactfully integrate media literacy into their instruction. Furthermore, previous studies have suggested designing curricular resources as an effective form of media literacy professional learning. This case study examined how high school teachers of different content areas integrate media literacy into their instruction while participating in an online professional development course and how high school teachers applied the content from a media literacy online professional development course to design media literacy instruction. Findings indicated teachers made minor changes to their previous instructional practice, which indicated that participating in the online course led them to think about media literacy integration in new ways. Additionally, teachers applied the online professional development content by using media to build background knowledge, offering explicit media literacy strategy instruction and support, promoting independent practice at the intersection of content curricula and media literacy, and assigning media production to demonstrate content knowledge. Recommendations include equipping teachers with media literacy background knowledge, examining instruction stemming from media literacy professional development, and empowering teachers to design media literacy instruction through critical lenses.

The closing of schools world-wide in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a rapid and unexpected shift from predominantly in-person teaching to online teaching practices. As teacher educators in the field of educational technology, we wondered about the preparedness of teachers for making the transition to fully online environments. Through an internationally distributed survey consisting of predominantly open-ended questions, we captured teachers’ perceptions of this transition. We aimed to inform our practice and that of other teacher educators about the strengths and weaknesses of professional development designed to develop teachers’ digital competence. In this paper, we present data from Norwegian (n = 574) and US (n = 239) teachers related to their elaborations on readiness. We qualitatively examined data for evidence of extent of preparedness and alignment to the pedagogical, ethical, attitudinal, and technical dimensions of digital competence. Findings indicated themes related to extent of preparedness, trends in preparation, focus on digital tools, teacher agency without autonomy, collaboration/networks, and challenges for work and learning lives. Findings informed implications and recommendations for the professional development of teachers’ digital competence at the teacher education, K-12 schools, and school policy/leadership levels.