The last historical period we have just faced has been difficult, a very hard test for everyone, including for the Italian School and education in general. The lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic-which no one expected-and all the consequences it has generated within the school facility, has brought unmitigated inconvenience. Students and faculty, but also all school staff, have been dealing with days of suspension, uncertainty, and remote teaching. Interactions have perforce become telematic and “smart,” and in a short time IT skills and infrastructure have been required that both faculty and students, could not easily obtain in a short time.
Today, more than ever, advanced technological and IT skills are required for the teacher to upgrade to become a 4.0 teacher. The same goes for schools, which must work to succeed in creating a technological and IT infrastructure fabric that is up to the new digital environment. Teacher training and the provision of digital classrooms characterized by hardware and software components capable of handling increasingly smart and interactive teaching are the basis for school progress.
The process of change is already underway and every School must take part in it to improve its technological compartment.In this article we will find out what directions a 4.0 teacher should follow, what technologies can make a difference within the school environment, and how to improve digitization and the teaching approach through digital education, which is essential for a School that is increasingly smart and in step with the world around us.
Sommario
How School is changing: the evolution toward digital education
We know that the move to distance education was not a choice widely shared by all: regardless, however, it was the only way to ensure continuity and a relationship-even if at a distance-between faculty and students. Learning thus continued during the lockdown months, through a forcing that involved thousands of students and professors around the world: teaching staff had to roll up their sleeves and fill the knowledge gap needed to carry on teaching through the digital approach in a very short time.
Not all teachers, however, possessed the necessary tools and skills to carry out adequate work, and the same is true for many students, who lacked the technological infrastructure to provide them with maximum connectivity and operability. Moreover, not all public and private schools could guarantee such an immediate transition in terms of digital context. In fact, in recent years much progress has been made in this field, and more and more schools have integrated important technological compartments, to make teaching smarter, and work toward a structure that would lean more and more toward so-called Blended learning, but this concerns only a small percentage of Italian schools.
The remainder, during such an accelerated forcing of regime change suffered from the inadequacy of their digital and technological compartment, being unable to guarantee the best in terms of distance education. The same is true of teacher training and the IT equipment available to them: these have not been up to the task of making a quick transition to skills that must now become those of the 4.0 teacher.
In disgrace, fortunately, we have come to terms with the human capacity to make do, and the process of digital mutation-which in previous years had been going on albeit slowly-has finally accelerated, with most Schools in every part of the world now involved.
Why are digital skills and new tools needed for digital education?
It has already been seen for some how the interactive whiteboard and electronic register have become not only tools that support teaching, but essential in the process of evolution toward digital education.
While they were used occasionally before, however, now schools that had already embarked on a digitization path were able to take advantage of these tools to enhance and ensure the potential for learning, without communication being interfered with during the lockdown.
Generally, the interactive whiteboard has always been underestimated, but the reality is that it is a powerful communicative medium that can undoubtedly improve the 4.0 approach to education. In fact, new schools, those that tend to go smart and interface with a cutting-edge digital environment on a daily basis, know that tools such as the interactive whiteboard and digital ledger form the basis for leading the School toward an evolution, as they ensure simple and secure data collection, improving participation, assessment and learning levels.
Until before the lockdown, many schools had taken steps to introduce new tools for teachers and students through interventions that countered cyberbullying, education pathways using new media, computer network safety courses, and prevention projects for gaming addictions: the digital network was certainly growing, but still too slowly. These were long paths and not all Italian schools could guarantee environments capable of providing smart learning opportunities through digital education.
After the first days of March, however, the School had to force the transformation process, in order to offer distance education appropriate to the new way of communication. For teachers, it can be called a learning process for all intents and purposes: these months have seen an improvement in the degree of professionalism and skills of the teaching staff. Learning has certainly been challenging: if Industry 4.0 had to do with the fourth industrial revolution, so today’s teachers have carried out a real digital revolution, and have increasingly adapted to the new standards of digital education and smart learning.
Today’s teachers are lecturers who can better manage data, perform multitasking tasks, connect quickly with students and instructional staff, and create multimedia content, including elaborate content, putting skills that are characteristic of digital natives to work for them.
It must be admitted, however, that already in recent years the School had been moving toward a digitization process, albeit slowly: this then led to being able to face the lockdown period with fairly adequate tools and skills, although not in all schools. This is precisely why, today, we need to speed up the transformation process, so that we can close the gap and improve every aspect and gap, ensuring that every Italian student has digital and smart learning.
After all, students enrolling in School in the near future will be looking for digital and state-of-the-art school settings. In fact, they will be led to prefer schools that can offer computer equipment appropriate to the new requirements, with 4.0 teachers specially trained to know how to handle a digital environment appropriately.
What is required of a Digital School: smart education and teacher 4.0
With the advent of technology in Schools, therefore, the tasks of each professional figure and their training will change: workers, technicians, clerks, managers and teachers will have to approach work in a more engaging, creative and dynamic way.
Building on what happened during the months of distance education, it is clear that smart education will be the basis of the new education and the new education model of the 21st century. New generations of digital natives have a pronounced interest in this dimension. Spaces such as the E-sports Palace or the Digital Lab, are very important tools of inclusion and aggregation for kids, but also ideal for interactive and dynamic learning through emotional, physical and visual experience.
There are many studies that show how interactivity and emotions can speed up the learning process and improve the ability to be able to remember knowledge in the long run. Promoting the educational potential of interactive teaching within the new digital schools is therefore the basis of the transformation process.
Teaching must therefore be aimed at public and collective learning: educational processes must be activated cooperatively, through a research and experimentation set-up. The new digital schools will need to educate both teachers and students in this metamorphosis, so that all parts of the school community are empowered. Parents will also be involved in this process, as they will need to consider possible interactive and smart ways to conduct interviews with parents, teachers and children through listening desks and remote conferencing platforms such as Teams, Skype, Meet, Zoom or others.
Media education and the goals of the Digital School
The media have been a part of our society for a very long time now. Obviously, being able to understand how to interpret news conveyed by the media is a fundamental skill for the citizens of the future, thus for today’s students. The new Web 2.0, born with the advent of social networking, has transformed the Internet and also created enormous opportunities for communication and information “from below.” This has made the process of understanding the media even more complicated, and today, untangling within this world is complex and takes a lot of attention and awareness.
What, then, is media education in detail? Media eucation is a key teaching subject, especially within schools: it covers not only new types of media, but encompasses all media, so also film, radio, newspapers, television and the Web. Today, in fact we get informed thanks to all these tools, and for this reason the School also cannot lag behind and must rather keep up with the evolution of media, and use every available platform.
The media education lab is therefore a workshop that was created and developed with the aim of providing children with all the best tools to better understand each message offered by the media, – knowing the dynamics that can be created – in order to rework them independently from a critical point of view. Media education, when applied to the Internet, can be key to becoming better acquainted with the news and posts circulating online so that we can discern the differences and put them in context.
Using this teaching method, the new Digital School and 4.0 teachers, can provide a methodology that can explain the media phenomenon to young people, so as to interpret its language: knowing what to post, recognizing fake news, knowing how to manage the relationship with the Internet and social but also with other media, are all crucial points to gain real-life awareness and skills (even if it is often virtual, it affects real life).
Therefore, the School today has the task of not falling behind on these issues: targeted courses will have to be organized to update teachers and succeed in impressing these concepts on parents and children.
However, the new digital environment must also be adapted technologically, so hardware and software must be able to handle the new teaching dynamics. Upgrading must take place in terms of both technological and IT infrastructure, adapting the equipment available for teaching with state-of-the-art equipment such as state-of-the-art digital whiteboards and integrating classrooms with PCs and tablets as well as acquiring software that can enable students to understand the new world and create content that can improve communication. In this way, skills will be acquired that the “old School” could not give, as it was stuck on only one teaching lane, the same lane that is now, however, enriched with new digital and multimedia insights.
The process of digitization has begun, accelerated by the latest historical vicissitudes: now schools and teachers are required to work toward it, so as to ensure modern communication and learning aimed at meeting the needs of the twenty-first century, which sees different teaching methods as well as changed social and cultural dynamics. The revolution is underway, and slowly, by acquiring tools and skills, the new model will permanently change the school structure.
