Our digital school: from emergency management to sustainable change over time

The digital evolution of teaching is not just an opportunity, rather, as the most difficult months of the pandemic have shown, it is a necessity.
To make it more widely available in our country, however, we first need infrastructure able to support it. TIM is involved in a major project aimed at overcoming the geographical digital divide, taking fixed and mobile ultrabroadband nationwide. This is the context within which we also find the Infratel initiative to equip all schools with ultrafast connections, which TIM has joined having been awarded two lots of the tender.  The institutes of Tuscany, Veneto, Marche, Abruzzo, Molise and Apulia will be able to connect to the ultrabroadband network, thereby accessing essential services for teachers and students.

Beyond the COVID-19 emergency: infrastructure and competencies    

In order to transform the way we perceive teaching, however, we do not just need better infrastructure. We also need to develop a culture that can address a change that is not only technological, but which also involves skills, professionalism and behaviour.
To do so, we need to develop a sustainable digital education project, which leaves no one behind, in territorial, social and generational terms.

A new form of integrated, improved teaching: thanks to digital

One initiative taken in this sense is the  “New Digital Teachers - Integrated teaching for open schools” course run by WeSchool in partnership with TIM, as part of the Operazione Risorgimento Digitale. It is a free-of-charge training opportunity open to 5,000 teachers interested in enriching and supplementing teaching with new technologies, which has also made it possible to obtain opinions on the pros and cons of distance teaching (or “DAD” as it has been termed in Italy).

A survey has ensued, organised by Censis, which reveals that approximately 70% of participants had signed up for the course with motivations that go beyond the “shock to the education system” dictated by the pandemic and that in particular those aged over 50 (most of the survey respondents) were in search of an opportunity for a professional refresher course. Even more significantly, 92.1% of participants stated that the new digital technologies can make face-to-face lessons more effective and engaging. Classroom teaching is still considered irreplaceable, yet more than 89% of those interviewed believe it necessary to supplement it with digital tools.

Beyond the tools, the importance of digital citizenship

Again as part of the Operazione Risorgimento Digitale, TIM also proposes, together with Gruppo Editoriale La Scuola SEI, “Digital Citizenship”, a free training course for teachers that meets the need to address the relationship between life and teaching on-line/off-line and addresses difficult topics like cyberbullying.  The purpose of the 10 webinars is to provide teachers with all the tools necessary to train aware digital citizens through interdisciplinary courses that put the student right at the heart of the learning process.