Speech at the round table on "How best to use digital technologies in teaching history from primary to high school".
Good practices for history teaching with ICT in primary school
It is a priority objective of the school to develop in the students the ability to search for, find, select and use the information for the solution of a problem, activating an attitude of continuous self-education, and connect all this with the ability to relate, compare and collaborate with others.
The socio-cultural constructivist approach starts from the assumption that learning is a fundamentally social phenomenon, in which knowledge is the product of active and conscious construction, implemented through forms of collaboration and negotiation. This type of approach leads to a continuous restructuring of the conceptual network, generating new knowledge and making the learners aware of their ways of learning.
From a constructivist point of view, the teacher designs learning environments, intentionally built to allow active, rich, varied and conscious paths to orient but not direct the student, allowing him to use a wide variety of tools and resources. Environments enriched by moments of individual and collective reflection, by questions and deliveries that the student can face choosing paths and methods, depending on their style, interests and personal strategies.
The technologies and the network, container of information and virtual community, represent a tool full of potential available to those who have the responsibility to organize and manage training and education systems.
Teacher training must also be consistent with a school model that wants to become an environment for building skills as well as knowledge and no longer a place for the transmission of codified and rigid knowledge. Only a teacher who uses these methods of study and training with a minimum of continuity can significantly transfer this behavior to the school by making its students experiment.
Technologies can be aimed at improving learning if used within specific teaching strategies, to support the implementation of "learning activities" that lead students to explore and build new knowledge, to apply them for the realization of the "product" and to represent what they have learned.
Using technologies to "build" (material and immaterial artifacts) the learners:
- take an active role in their own learning;
- develop responsibilities;
- are cognitively and emotionally involved;
- elaborate and re-elaborate their own knowledge;
- explore and analyze new knowledge;
- develop thinking skills;
Learners do not learn directly from technology, they learn thinking about what they are doing.
In the four hours of workshop with the teachers, I will present many experiences and resources already used by the teachers for the teaching of history with the use of information and communication technologies. Starting from a map, I will learn about games, WebQuests, containers for research, paths on the concept of time, software to create maps and timelines, digital libraries.