Abstract:

Introduction:
The main goals of Hospital School are prevent early school leaving and sustain children’s peers relationships.
This system, as a whole, is very complex; therefore, it is clear that a “conventional” teaching method cannot easily find its applicability in this context (Benigno et al. 2018).
From time to time, teachers in hospital schools adopt alternative educational strategies, including those that employ innovative educational supports like ICT.
The Covid-19 pandemic highly impacted School Education, who has required a structural transformation challenge.
In attempt to limit the spread of the Covid-19, the Italian government has implemented restrictive measures that limit social contacts. Such measures have disrupted the normal functioning of all types of schools, including Hospital Schools.
During lockdown, access to “Giannina Gaslini” Pediatric Hospital was restricted to authorized personnel. Patients had contact just with doctors, nurses, and their parents. Consequently, Hospital Teachers cannot meet the new patients or maintain the relationship with the pupils they have already met.

The approach adopted:
To deal with the difficulties highlighted above, in the context of CLIPSO (Hybrid Classes For Hospital School) project, a research carried out by ITD-CNR (Institute for Educational Technology of the National Research Council) in collaboration with the “Giannina Gaslini” Pediatric Hospital aims to find inclusion-oriented methodologies through the use of educational technologies, a Participatory Action Research (PAR) was adopted in order to foster a change in the Hospital School teaching practice by the implementation of ICT in the learning environment.

Web-Lerning Environment (WEB-L-E)
Considering the pupils isolation due Covid-19, in collaboration with the Kindergarten Teachers two web learning environmenst, as virtual spaces of relationship, were implemented.
A web learning environment is a physical space in which students can communicate with their teachers and work together with them on digital learning contents.

The web learning environments were developed with Google Sites for the following reasons:
• It is flexible. It is possible to embed many other online tools as Thinglink for interactive maps, Educandy for educational games and Padlet to publish pupils’ drawings and works on the web environment.
• It is dynamic. The purpose is to edit it over time depending on the educational needs.
Two different WEB-L-E have been realized: the first is The tree house: an interactive environment with Montessori inspiration to get to know the trees ; the latter Play in the City : An interactive environment to discover and take care of the city of Genoa.

Future scenarios:
The experience of lockdown period has requested to develop and think up new ways of teaching, to communicate with isolated pupils in hospital. Due to social contacts restrictions, the WEB-Learning Environments, could be considered a good opportunity to have remote education resources. They have been designed as distant learning solutions, but can also be used when teachers will be allowed to meet pupils in person.

Keywords:

Hospital School, alternative educational strategies, inclusion-oriented methodologies, Participatory Action Research, web learning environment, Covid-19.