The literature reviewed so far put forward many implications towards teacher trainers; methodology teachers are required to be experts of technological pedagogy to provide experimenting opportunities for their trainees and serve as role models. For this, the ideal teachers are the ones who hold positive beliefs and attach positive values to technology inclusion into education. Different contexts, however, facilitate inclusion in several ways. Jung (2005) reviewed the ICT-pedagogy integration of teacher training programmes worldwide, and found that there were four major directions:

To paint a comprehensive picture of teacher trainers’ professional stances on ICT in the 31 OECD countries (at that time), Ananiadou and Rizza (2010) designed a mixed methods study involving questionnaires, in-depth interviews and conducting case studies in each corresponding country. The researchers conducted a case study in a techno-inclusive and one in a not techno-inclusive university of each participating country. While student respondents perceived that 77.5% of their teachers attach medium to high importance to ICT inclusion, in the United Kingdom, only 28% of students perceived that their instructors’ ICT skills were very good (Ananiadou & Rizza, 2010, p. 5625). However, teacher trainers rather homogeneously reported a good level of ICT availability and level of confidence in using ICT across all OECD countries, nevertheless even in an as highly developed country as Sweden, such issues alter teacher trainers’ willingness to use ICT in their classes as having to carry the equipment to the classrooms or the unavailability of certain programmes on the classroom equipment. Teachers indicated that they would welcome support staff and ready-made equipment in classrooms. They also named lack of time and lack of sharing good practices within departments as difficulties, nonetheless there is general agreement towards the necessity of inclusion of technology in teacher training (Ananiadou & Rizza, 2010). Teacher trainers expressed their needs towards the necessity of teachers’ continuous professional development (CPD) in the field of educational technology.

Professional development workshops or circles from specific educational contexts are seen as the most effective ways of ensuring actual development (Koster et al., 2008; McArdle & Coutts, 2010; Wardip et al., 2015). Frequently, the need for such workshops unfolds from informal, collegial conversations (Avalos, 2011; Fekete & Divéki, 2022). In other cases, local workshops are promoted by teachers who experience that they are surrounded by colleagues with more modern teaching methods, and they would like to learn from them (McArdle & Coutts, 2010). Workshops also work best if there is a pre-designed timetable to be followed and goals to be reached (Wardip, 2015), for example how and what specific technology to use in teaching listening skills, or how to facilitate online learning through an LMS system. By comparing two rounds of professional workshop series, Boei and colleagues (2015) concluded that the second round proved to be more effective than the first one because the latter offered a clear schedule and participants who were interested in the series had to sign up to participate. In this sense, the originally informal workshop series also underwent organisational changes for the better.

Moreover, organising context-specific workshops or professional development cycles has many added benefits for teaching communities. First of all, by getting to know colleagues’ teaching practices, it can alleviate the tension between individuals and within the individual about their classroom practices (McArdle & Coutts, 2010). Knowledge sharing can also result in developing critical skills to evaluate the necessity of certain technology inclusion (Koster et al., 2008; Vescio et al., 2008). A second gain is the added benefit of building better professional relationships between members of a given teaching community (Fekete & Divéki, 2022; Wardip, 2015). Finding a specific groups’ “optimum technology practices” (Wang et al., 2020, p. 4412) and providing possibilities for experimenting could result in many collective gains within a teaching community. It is also encouraged that institutions establish departmental or cross-departmental technology centres that could provide IT help, opportunities for organising development programs (Wang et al., 2020) and even serve as research centres (Fekete & Divéki, 2022).