Report on Giovanni Biondi's speech.
The speaker spoke about the introduction of mixed school textbooks in schools, capable of exploiting the enormous potential offered by digital languages, focusing on the involvement of students in the processes of building knowledge. It is now necessary to start a transformation of the way of teaching and learning, moving from a transmission of knowledge to a construction of knowledge, not disdaining the use of tools such as video games and overcoming the idea of the "laboratory of computer science" to transform each class in a laboratory without disciplinary boundaries.
The opportunities of digital
Schools today must be able to make use of the opportunities offered by digital technology, including in terms of history. Certainly, one of the main problems of the teaching of history is the anachronism, capital sin of the historian according to Marc Bloch or Lucien Fevre who underlined how it is impossible to think that the way of expressing oneself or the perceptions of men lived in the Middle Ages were the same as those of a man of today. We know how difficult it is to deal with issues that concern distant eras, how difficult it is for children to consider the "variable time" - a variable that vice versa outlines the field of study of the historian - and for us to deal with it in a didactic way. To history, which is apparently far from technology and digital languages - a term that I prefer to use here - these actually offer a series of answers that schools cannot ignore: for example, it is possible to make fascinating diachronic analyses of a territory or a city... through digital technology it becomes possible to reconstruct an architectural heritage that would otherwise be difficult to imagine. That's why we thought about changing traditional textbooks.
Books, manuals and digital language
It's not just about lightening our students' backpacks, nor about moving from reading on paper to reading on video. The fact is that the vast majority of history manuals have now assumed enormous dimensions, but they can become much more effective if some of the materials are transferred to a digital medium: maps, historical documents, sources could be consulted in large quantities. For this reason, we thought of moving to a "mixed" book in which the "narrative" part, which - and this applies to all disciplines - responds to a certain structure of knowledge, a way of representing knowledge in a sequential way, with the subdivision into chapters, paragraphs, etc., will continue to be printed. The book remains indispensable, nor will it lose its value for the construction of individual critical knowledge; if today we want to consult a map and navigate in a spatial sense, we no longer use the old, glorious De Agostini atlas, but digital supports that make it enormously easier to manipulate and use knowledge on a given territory. Not just an e-book, therefore, but a mixed book, a particularly effective choice for history manuals. If the problem is that of starting to practice a constructivist didactic, to construct it is necessary to manipulate documents, an operation for which digital offers extraordinary opportunities and of which the students become protagonists. Just as young people are happy to attend facebook, download music, etc., because they are the protagonists of those operations and their attitude is active, so we also have the same goal: to involve our students in a process of building knowledge.
to be continued in the next part https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d878dc58d5b5f00ad32ca96/the-miur-and-the-digital-school-plan-resources-and-opportunities-part-2-5d8f73febc251400adb76c2e