Abstract:

IDEA (Innovazione Didattica E Apprendimento ) is a two-year project that follows the philosophy of the European Commission's "Open Education" initiative. The objective of this initiative is to change the role of digital technologies in education, used as a way to achieve European Union’s targets to reduce school drop-outs and increase the rate of people completing tertiary education. Among necessary actions, we can cite: helping learning institutions, teachers and learners acquire digital skills and learning methods; connecting classrooms and develop digital devices and contents; involving all stakeholders. IDEA encourages a change in teaching methods based on a discerning use of technologies in education. The IDEA platform offers various tools to explore different educational paths: an Instructional Design Tool; School Without Walls: the Augmented Reality platform and App for a ubiquitous learning experience; an Artificial Intelligence tool that promotes the discovery of cross-curricular aspects of school subjects. Teachers get acquainted with these tools while being coached by didactics and technology experts. The project runs in 2 phases. In the 1st phase, guided by the experts, teachers explore the technologies and create educational material to be used in their classes. In the 2nd phase which is the experimentation phase, they transfer the competences acquired to their classroom. In this phase, teachers benefit from the experts support, but online. During the 2nd experimentation, teachers were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the experimentation and assess students learning through the use of a control group, pre- and post- testing the class.

The project started School Year 2018/19. With the help of experts, teachers explored the chosen educational path. Themes focused on:
1) Ubiquitous learning experience with the help of Augmented Reality,
2) Computational Thinking with the help of Internet of Things and
3) Cross curricular aspects of school subjects with an Artificial Intelligence module.

The project also offers in-depth coverage of the relevant topics through conferences, seminars and webinars. During School Year 2019/20, the Computational Thinking theme was enriched with a new platform that gives remote access (live and asynchronously) to real-life laboratories: RIALE (Remote Intelligent Access to Lab Experiment). The platform has a main timeline on which the experiment procedure, key concepts, related learning objects and a registration of the experiment can be found. For the asynchronous sessions, teachers can tailor the timeline content to suit the class level.

In this paper we’ll report on the project implementation over two years of activities, on the difficulties arisen due to the Covid crisis and the solutions adopted to ensure the project continuation. We’ll present the quantitative data related to the actors, the type of school, subject taught by teachers, as well as the results of the teachers satisfaction survey.

IDEA is an ongoing project evolving to better respond to the objective to help teachers and learners acquire digital skills and learning methods and to develop digital contents. With the scope of addressing better teachers’ needs, we were able to finance a third year of activity (school year 2020/21), which is dedicated to empower the RIALE concept and platform and contribute to consolidate concepts linked to scientific experiments thanks to the interactive timeline.

Keywords:

Teacher education, Technology Enhanced Learning Activities, Educational platforms.