TRAINING NEEDS OF TEACHERS IN ICT: TRAINING PROFILES AND ELEMENTS OF COMPLEXITY

Teachers' training needs in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is one of the key aspects for the integration of ICT into daily educational practice, along with competencies in ICT and teachers' use of these technological resources. This paper aims to establish teacher training profiles to help relate them to their ICT competencies and use thereof, together with personal and contextual factors. To this end, a questionnaire design has been used with a sample of 868 primary and secondary education teachers in the Valencian Community (E. Spain) to collect information. The results obtained indicate that teachers demand higher-level training in the personalprofessional area, and that they require more training with students in classrooms and to integrate ICT into classrooms. Furthermore, these needs can be arranged into four profiles: initial, initial-intermediate, intermediate and advanced. A clear relationship was also found between these training needs profiles with ICT competencies, especially technology; use of ICT, mainly in the personalprofessional area. Teachers' age and frequency of computer use were seen to also influence these profiles. This implies that educational administrations should consider these results when developing teacher training plans to produce higher quality programmes in accordance with demand from various fields.