Abstract:

This paper aims to introduce a polyhedral approach to innovate educators training: a table of digital improvements, attempts and achievements into a participatory community of learners, teachers, makers and professionals from the educational sector. The meaningful creation of live educational models enables good practices and develops collaborative and supportive relationships among community members.

Accordingly, TEDD (Technologies for Education: Devices and Diversity) stands as the first pilot project in Italy. It is an advanced course, held by the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento. The goal of TEDD is to train a selected and heterogeneous group (for age, nationality and educational background) to deal with the complex interdependence between education and technology in the modern society. Heterogeneity of each student background is fundamental for the development of a multidisciplinary approach, which enhances a common reflection about teaching, beyond traditional fields’ limits. Consequently, multidisciplinary approach changes the perspective of thinking about teachers formation and the teaching itself, focusing on student’s needs and differences.

On the methodological point of view, the TEDD educational approach includes hints from various theories as well as socio-constructivism, constructionism, project-based learning and connectivism. Contents cover a great variety of topics, such as educational robotics, computational thinking, smart communities and serious gaming and digital infrastructures of the school. Furthermore, TEDD incorporates innovative aspects that will be described in our paper, such as professional figures (the leader, the mentor, etc.), setting (shared and divisible table, online shared cloud etc.) and products (games, educational projects, robotic programming, etc.).
Methods, roles, techniques, resources and setting are defined into a flexible structure that fosters the participants’ sense of belonging to a live community.

In this context all activities (metacognitive learning sessions, collaborative tasks, laboratories and individual commitment) take place in a didactic environment where human and virtual interactions simultaneously occur. Thus, most of the teaching and learning efforts synchronically happen on the real digital binary system.

At the end of TEDD course, learners become active representatives of the same educational model that has generated their own professional growth. This paper represents the final spontaneous output of TEDD, where students become independent performers of educational innovations.

Therefore, TEDD constitutes a live educational model of change, challenge and improvement, that enacts a significant example of knowledge management democratization, where each element differences contributes to the development of new educational trends.
From these starting point, the authors want to share our experience based on this innovative and unique project, in order to inspire further development on the research field and to take part actively into a shared knowledge network.

Keywords:

Learning, teaching, innovation, educational methodology, students perspective, educational technologies.