LIBRI DI LAURA FEDELI

The special needs teacher is a highly qualified professional whose role is to work in collaboration with all class teachers to activate an inclusive approach for the benefit of all students and to enable individual potentialities. Technology can be of paramount importance in designing learning activities according to the principles of Universal Design for Learning in an interdisciplinary approach and with a holistic perspective of all involved actors in the teaching/learning process. In Italy, the prospective special needs teacher has the opportunity to be fully trained thanks to a comprehensive specialization course where the areas of competence of digital literacy are addressed in a specific course. The study reports a cross analysis of three editions of an Information and Communication Technology course, with a focus on the results of the last edition, whose online format was discussed starting from strengths identified in the first two face-to-face editions of the same course.

Il volume intende contribuire a perimetrare concettualmente l’ambito di ricerca dello sviluppo professionale della docenza universitaria, considerata una priorità politica globale dell’Higher Education. Esiste la necessità di potenziare la professionalità docente attraverso azioni di Faculty Development all’interno di centri come i Teaching and Learning Center, che prevedono sistemi di valorizzazione delle competenze acquisite attraverso la formazione.

The complexity of the class context changes knowledge that, today, experiments more and more the ambiguity between global and local. Knowledge seems to aim at the construction of nets of modal meanings. Even the posture of teachers and students change and feedback is one of the aspects that can mostly affect learning by fostering the acceptance of reciprocal worlds present in the class context. In this direction, also feedback seems to change and from an informative structure, as proposed by Gagné, feedback is acquiring a generative rationale, that is, a structure able to open different interpretative perspectives. In the present contribution modalities of feedback collection are described such as Mentimeter.com and Google.com forms being used in different courses at the department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism at the University of Macerata. Those tools were used to valorise the students’ informal and non formal knowledge and to define personalized trajectories. Feedback surely was the tool able to bridge the students’ and teachers’ experience and knowledge towards the construction of a net of meanings built in context.

Technology is, here, meant as an umbrella concept that finds its location in some dimensions of the school governance such as a practice of scrutiny and a means to develop teacher training, but mostly as part of students’ background and expectations to be shared in a co-constructed curriculum.Technologies, nowadays, have been developing a new “world order” where education can cover some of the gaps students can hardly handle by just “living” the digital reality in which they are fully involved also thanks to a continuous online connection aided by the mobile devices.Being autonomous in managing online contacts and information doesn’t mean being digitally confident citizens and educational institutions can help identifying personalized and self-regulated learning path where students’ needs and potentialities can find in the collaborative construction of the curriculum a common ground which ensure equity of the educational offer and respect of diversity at the same time.