 Hello, my name is Miguel Ignáez and this is the Digitally Competent Educational Organizations course organized by the INTEF. I'm here to introduce you to a few key concepts related to teacher professional development in the digital society. Technologies in general and digital technologies in particular have posed great challenges for the professional development of educational organizations, but at the same time they have provided great opportunities. One of the challenges we have to face is making our educational organizations more digitally competent. One of the cornerstones of achieving this goal is the professional development of the members of that organization. This is the best way to ensure that the professionals who make up our institution become more and more digitally competent on every level. Digital technology has also provided vast opportunities for teacher professional development and also for institution professional development, that is for schools that learn. We have been discussing the issue of teacher training for several years now. The discussion focuses on how to make our teachers improve their knowledge, their attitude, their skills and overall their competence in the best possible manner before and during the exercise of their profession. Thanks to investigations and practical experience we have come to realize the more traditional training activities based on a model of transmitting information in which teaching professionals don't play an active role, do not work. This is why we no longer talk about teacher training. This is now perceived as a one-way type of activity dominated by an expert who trains teachers. Nowadays, we prefer to talk about teacher professional development processes. The term includes both training processes that are led and carried out by the teachers themselves with or without the help of experts and collective training processes which involve the participation of a learning professional community. But let's go back to the professional development of the organization and of the members that make up that organization and talk about how they can improve their professional and digital competence. People often say that schools are spaces specially designed for students to learn. However, schools are rarely thought of as learning spaces for all of their members. It is of the utmost importance to keep in mind that students are not the only ones who learn in schools. A good teacher is a teacher that never stops learning. In other words, a good teacher is a professional in a state of continuous improvement. A good school is a school that learns and becomes an intelligent organization in search of improvement. This improvement is not a generic one. The goal is to improve the learning experience of the students. But how can we achieve that? It can partly be achieved by means of a more personalized, continuous and comprehensive teacher professional development. In other words, teacher professional development supported and enhanced by digital media. In order to discuss teacher professional development and the way people learn in this age of technology, it is absolutely necessary to talk about two key concepts. Personal learning environments, PLE, and organizational learning environments, OLE. But why are these concepts special? Throughout this course, we will address some of the main concepts and ideas related to this specific approach on how people learn in this age of technology. According to one of the most popular definitions suggested in recent years, personal learning environments are structures that include tools, sources of information, networks, activities, cognitive mechanisms, and metacognitive mechanisms that a person regularly sets into motion in order to learn. According to the definition, each and every one of us has a PLE, whether we are teachers or students. Even if they don't know it, anyone who is involved in a learning process has a personal learning environment. This includes all the processes, tools, and connections we set into motion in order to learn. It also reflects the way that actions are organized in our learning ecology. Not surprisingly, some authors describe personal learning environments as the actualization of our learning ecology. We have always had PLEs. Nowadays, though, technology provides us with a vast amount of information, networks, and ways of obtaining that information and of managing knowledge. And that is why understanding how a personal learning environment works and how the metacognitive strategies are set into motion in order to enrich the PLE is now more relevant than ever. Furthermore, precisely, some of the wet 2.0 tools allow us to manage the overwhelming amount of resources and connections and redirect them so that they can be integrated in our knowledge and learning flow in an adequate manner in order to suit our needs. As for the organizational learning environment, OLE, the concept is similar to the personal learning environment. The difference is that it also includes the organizational and contextual aspect related to the teaching practice. An OLE can be defined as a socio-material structure that encompasses sources of information, tools, activities, cognitive mechanisms, and networks of individuals that an organization regularly uses in order to learn. In this sense, schools are learning organizations. The OLEs belonging to educational organizations are not only compilations of PLEs belonging to the members that make up the institution. They also encompass the relations that exist between all the components and which allow the organization to be in a continuous learning process, the way the components are organized and the way they communicate with one another. The role technology plays in all the processes, the underlying philosophy, etc. In short, schools' organizational learning environments consist of structures, actions and thoughts that allow them to learn. The OLE structure connects the synergies of all the PLEs belonging to the members of the organization, their beliefs about the job they perform, with the learning needs of the organization, and with the people and other organizations we interact with the given organization and with its everyday work. What can an organization do in order to encourage its members to maintain their PLEs in a good state? There are three key aspects which an organization can have influence on. First, make the individuals that make up your organization aware they have a PLE and that it is important to get familiar with it, enhance it and take full advantage of it. Provide the members of your organization with learning opportunities that can be integrated in their PLEs. In addition to being certified activities and appreciated inside and outside the organization, these opportunities should become a part of the PLE of the members and not just be isolated activities. Promote member autonomy and make them aware that they can take full advantage of the school's resources in order to enhance their PLEs. Schools should strive to ensure that people use and exploit their resources. Here we include both available resources, library, Wi-Fi, network storage, blog infrastructures, etc., and other resources that can be acquired or that can be accessed in a centralized manner, like educational accounts required for the use of certain tools, institutional subscriptions, etc. With respect to the steps the organization could take in order to improve its OLE, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Nevertheless, there are some basic steps to take. The first one is not related to technology. It refers to trying to unify the vision that the members have on the foundations of that organization, on how the organization is and what it wants to be. Once you do that, you have to focus on setting short-term, medium-term, and long-term learning goals for the organization. For instance, these goals may range from getting to know the PLEs of its different members to learning how to improve the communication floor or how to pay murals. Interest is a starting point and from here we can move on to shaping the information and communication flow and the way we relate to these flows. For instance, we can make an inventory with sources that provide relevant information about what is happening inside the institution and outside it. Everyone should read it. Create commissions to help us curate relevant contents and identify resources or persons that could be of interest for our organization. The results should be disseminated through one of the internal communication channels. Recreate learning spaces in our everyday school dynamics, which is full of bureaucratic obstacles. Here we can include activities such as drinking a cup of coffee together with other colleagues, organizing a work branch so that we can talk to each other about our activities, workshops in which colleagues can share their classroom practices or workshops in which we can invite somebody to talk about a certain topic, etc. We could even register in training courses such as this one that could have an impact in our organization. As we mentioned at the beginning, PLEs and OLEs can help us understand how an organization and its members learn with the help of technology. As we further develop our organizations, PLEs and OLEs and we become more aware of how to improve and enhance them, the possibility of improving the digital and the digital and the general competence of our institution increases.