Developing readiness of teachers to use digital technologies in inclusive education

Digital technologies are rapidly spreading, thus, providing unlimited access to digital tools, materials and services. The spread of digital technologies leads to qualitative changes in production and global markets and affects the education sector. During the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, educational organizations at various levels were forced to transfer the learning process to an online format, which required prompt resolution of a set of issues to ensure the quality of teacher training to implement the education process using digital technologies. This problem has not lost its relevance since not all the teachers are sufficiently proficient in digital technologies. In the context of inclusive education, this issue is aggravated by the fact that students with disabilities often study remotely and use specialized hardware and software. The subject of the research is the development of readiness of teachers to use digital technologies in inclusive education. The purpose of the study is a theoretical justification for the need to develop the readiness of teachers to use digital technologies in inclusive education and experimental verification of the effectiveness of the implementation of advanced training courses to develop the readiness of teachers to use digital technologies in inclusive education. To achieve the goal of the study, the following methods were used: the author's diagnostic tool “Assessing the skills of using digital technologies in the context of inclusive education”, the advanced training course “Digital technologies in the context of inclusion”, the e-inclusion service and the methods of mathematical statistics. The results show that the initial state of readiness of teachers to use digital technologies within the framework of inclusive education in the experimental group differs from the final one (23,3 > 3,8 = χ20,05), which allows us to conclude that the effect of change has arisen as a result of the use of empirical methods for teachers training. The readiness of teachers to use digital technologies in inclusive education has increased in the following aspects: normative regulation of the digital and inclusive educational environment; material and technical equipment of inclusive education in the digital environment; creating inclusive online content.