Classes with YouTube, iTunes and podcasts. This is the future.

 Innovating teaching, rejuvenating the traditional classroom, revolutionising the education model. Those are some of the advantages that innovation has. Multimedia blackboards and tablets, that are given to each student, change the way they stay in class, and learning increases a lot.

In the last ministerial circular about schoolbooks the Book in Progress  has been approved. It includes some do-it-yourself books from Majorana High School in Brindisi that immediately convinced the Ite Tosi in Busto and today involve around 120 schools in Italy of which ten are in our province. “We’re sufficiently satisfied”, explains  Benedetto Di Renzo, one of the Book in Progress promoters. ” The insertion of those books has already been supported by the Ministers Profumo and Carrozza, so that we expected some more indications. On the contrary, the circular, includes them but without analysing them, without making them compulsory. They are still  postponing guide lines or costs that aren’t present yet“.

Today, there are books created by groups of teachers in almost every subject. Only  German and Spanish books are missing. “ On a local level”,remembers Di Renzo, ” teachers of the high schools in Gallarate contributed to the creation of the geography book, while the teacher of the Ite Tosi organised the grammar book. To make the system go full speed, the Indire should make available a “repository”, where every material that the teachers create could be put in, in order to widen the interchange platform.”

It was exactly the comparison and the team work that convinced Eugenia Bolis, the director of Ipc Verri in Busto, to share this experience. “ Going out of their classrooms, confronting, sharing opinions, this is the real importance of this experience. I gave the choice to participate or not to the different departments, in some cases there’re great results, in others there emerged some difficulties. But I believe that the experience is also positive in the light of the increase of the VAT by 22%, it’s a madness if we consider that those are schoolbooks.”

Technology is important but, in order to make the School 2.0, we need also to change the didactic approach; there are many systems to make innovations in the traditional lesson. Luca Piergiovanni, a passion for technology and experimentation, knows something about that. He is returning from a congress in Barcelona where he participated with 120 teachers from all over the world in “Global Educational Forum”. First of all, it was a human and a professional experience, “I was in a team with colleagues from Brunei, Jordan, Russia and Ukraine, I think that, in order to experience technology, we should change how we think. We should be open to comparison, to exchange, to sharing. Teachers should involve the students and give them the leading role; the students create the lesson and they offer it to their classmates. They are called flipped class because they are tipped over, the students themselves have the chair. In other states, technology is an essential part in the school, but we should not generalize because every society needs its own role model. So, technology is excellent if we use it in a ponderous way, if we know it quite well to recognize its advantages and limitations,” says Piergiovanni.

The potential is endless, on the web we can find every type of information, “Teachers are called upon to build the digital citizen of tomorrow. We should teach them to distinguish real sources from false ones. YouTube is an open school, where we can find every type of material. iTunes has thousands of lessons that students can access to deepen their knowledge, revise, repeat. There are e-learning platforms where they can meet to exchange opinions and knowledge. Every moment of the day is suitable for learning, comfortably sitting on the sofa, or while they are on the train or bus; you need just a lesson downloaded as the podcast. The secret is the sharing itself, the self-educated do not exist. Today the best teaching is the one that starts from experimentation, “learning by doing” inspired by the social connectivity.”

To create a School 2.0, a tablet is not enough; “ It is a long way because it requires a new educational approach. In Lombardy we are very lucky because we invest a lot. Not only in technology, but also in the education. We are progressing…”