Database of Publications

PIANO NAZIONALE SCUOLA DIGITALE. AZIONE LAVAGNE INTERATTIVE MULTIMEDIALI
(DIGITAL SCHOOL NATIONAL PLAN. WHITEBOARDS ACTION)

Various Authors

Le Monnier

2011

Italian

Report

School Directors, Researchers, Teachers, Policy Makers

Over 10 pages

The paper analyses a recent National Project, promoted by the Ministry of Education: The Digital School Plan. A particular attention is paid to the action dedicated to the use of Whiteboards (LIM), a powerful tool to work in a new interactive way, stimulating the collaboration between teachers and their students. In the first section of the document, the reasons of the National Plan are described besides the expected objectives and the detail of the actions planned. The reasons come from the consciousness that the new information and communication technologies can strongly help the birth of an innovative didactic, able to face and go along the numerous stimuli coming from the modern society. Indeed, during the last thirty years, the society underwent deep and rapid changes, but the school is actually disconnected and far from it, as well as from the world of job: this gap is coming wider and wider, therefore it is necessary to find a solution to fill in it.
On the light of this situation, ‘The Digital School Plan’ has been planned thinking that the school cannot be excluded by the digital innovation process, but, conversely, has to be promoter and protagonist of the change. Current students have a common ability, regardless of age or social background: they all know how to use a video game and are thus called ‘digital natives’. Digital communication is a language that all students can speak and understand and a powerful tool to set up a new effective methodology of teaching, opposing to the classical but ineffective mnemonic and abstract learning. The digital communication based methodology exalts the cognitive abilities of students by making them protagonists, together with their teachers, of the teaching learning process.
Thanks to the project, all schools, from primary to upper secondary school, are now provided with LIM and numerous courses started in order to help teachers to adopt this new teaching methodology.

The new technologies cannot be considered as a substitute of the teacher but as an opportunity to reach the usual objectives of school system: personalizing the training path allowing everyone to express his own intelligence, motivating students to learn more, making learning an active and not mnemonic process etc. School cannot be excluded or ignore the transformation that the society and the world of job are undergoing, because this transformation concerns the knowledge. New technologies are a concrete opportunity to pass from a ‘school of teaching’ to a ‘school for learning’, meaning a school with students protagonist, together with their teachers, of the construction of knowledge.
The use of new technologies as tool for the teaching-learning process, especially when scientific disciplines are concerned, can certainly provide positive changes in the school system, but requires more motivated and expert teachers. Actually, many teachers are diffident toward this new tool, not belonging to their generation but much more friendly with their students; sometimes they also feel inadequate in using LIM or ICT resources and refuse to test them with their students.

Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry – University of Genoa - ITALY