New technologies must not replace the socio-didactic-cooperative system. If anything, they must enhance and help to live the school better, perhaps replacing the notalistic moment
Over the past 10 years, the resources of the public school have been cut without any modesty. Now everyone knows it. Within a few years, 7 billion euros and 150 thousand operators were removed. The only item that was saved from this destruction was the one concerning the technological sector, or rather, the sector of Digital teaching.
What is the lim?
It began a few years ago with the so -called Lim (multimedia interactive blackboard) to be sent to practically all Italian schools. It should have replaced the traditional slate blackboard and introduce, in the management of frontal lessons, elements of enrichment related to the use of sources that are not strictly books. A LIM costs on average 2000 euros, plus installation and connection costs, without considering maintenance. But the LIM wants to be only the first step. The ambitious goal is to create the so -called digital classesnamely Lim, tablet, connections and furnishings consistent with the new environment.
There were 416 classes of this type in the 2012/2013 school year. The desired goal is to replace the paper -based teaching apparatus, especially books, with a didactic apparatus based solely on screens and keyboards.
A perspective that would not bring any savings. The incredible speed with which digital technologies change, would create a continuous need for renewal and adaptation in terms of structures and programs that would make it difficult to always remain in the step with the times. If the problem was not even this and it should be left towards the replacement of the book-biro school with the keyboard school, however, a series of non-overwhelming issues would remain.
Montessori and sensory method
It is necessary to think in pedagogical terms and in terms of learning. That is, once again not so much and not simply ask us what the latest fashion is, but what we can do to help the new generations learn adequately. An absolutely surprising data concerns the founders of the great digital connection systems, those who invented Wikipedia And Google. What schools come from? In the September 2011 the magazine Wiredwhich as the name says is for Antonomasia the journal of digital proponents everywhere, revealed that Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s inventor), Jimmy Wales (creator of Wikipedia) had a characteristic in common: they came from the Montessorian schools, where the primacy is totally of pure and simple sensoriality, touching, seeing, feeling, direct experience and where elements such as videos are almost non -existent.
What does it mean? To get to life to a good personal fulfillment you must spend your childhood and your learning time in contexts of direct experience where all sensory is developed through processes of free choice and of strong development of the personal creativitystarting from concrete problems. Nothing more different from the growing virtualization to which children would like to be used with the use of tablets since the very first years of life.
Therefore, to get to be creative genes of the new digital world you have to have spent childhood out of the digital world. Here is what the experience of these computer science guru tells us and here’s what the parents must know to avoid a trap that seems to satisfy that certain narcissism of families, that need to see their children more and more ahead and, in a certain sense, increasingly consumerous.
The word to science
Two recent searches have contributed to clearing the soil from easy illusions. The magazine Mind and brainin May 2013, a series of research developed in France, England and the United States in which the results of the learning carried out on the keyboard with that made with the common biro or pencil were compared. These studies converge on a very simple idea, that handwriting, in the traditional logic of taking the sheet with the pen, allows a coordination of fine motor skills with absolutely unique neurophysiological components and that the keyboard is not able to guarantee, to the point that the free hand -written themes from the children of elementary schools are clearly better than those that the pupils themselves write with the keyboard.
According to these studies, the writing with the pen allows a learning and development of the best skills than the keyboard: by drawing up the freehand texts, the children better manage the path that leads from the thoughts dissolved to the phrase accomplished, from a grammatical and content point of view; In addition, freehand writing also acts as a propulsor of memory. In other words, as Maria Montessori supported more than a century ago, in childhood learning is always connected to tactile and sensory experiences, to concrete operations and as possible based on freedom of choice.
Another research moves from childish soil to the more general one. In January 2014 the Italian magazine The sciencespublished an article in which various searches were reported where the greater ease of reading on the paper support was revealed than the screen: in five -year children the brain circuits dedicated to reading are activated when they try to write letters by hand, but not when they press the corresponding keys on a keyboard. The most interesting element is that the hypothesis is confirmed that replacing the card with a screen already at an early age involves disadvantages that are difficult to recover and that reading on paper favors learning much more than that on video. The brain prefers paper to read effectively.
How to help digital natives learn?
So what can parents do? How does it manage a situation that appears increasingly complex and the sense of helplessness grows in front of the emphasis given by everything and everyone on the need to bring a video screen to any environment to connect with? How to protect yourself from a deliberately cynical and arrogant commercial invadation? School is a social community and not a digital community: the advantage of the school is to have a class of individuals in flesh and blood that must necessarily enter into relationships to develop interactive learning processes.
It should not be forgotten that imitation is the basis of learning and that being in a social context allows us to more easily achieve the objectives that we have set ourselves. Therefore the school must enhance not so much not so much technological virtuality, but the continuous, inexhaustible, creative comparison between the pupils, the teachers and among the teachers and pupils themselves. In other words, a class must be managed as a social entity and not as a set of individuals more or less happened there by chance; This social entity is a resource for teaching, in the logic of cooperation, group work and imitation.
Insistening on the digital school means prefiguring the uselessness of the school: if what matters is to stay connected to a tablet, a video screen or even a lim, soon it may no longer be necessary to go physically at school. So the economists would have closed the circle: not only would they have succeeded in the unhealthy idea of saving on the school, instead of the waste that we register wherever we would have abolished the school itself as they would have abolished Social learning community which is organized in the logic of common work. To stay connected to a video it is not necessary to be present at school. If this is the real goal of the proponents of the digital school, there is nothing to worry about our children.
We put technology in the right place
So how can new technologies help to live school better, without transforming it into a further and very penal moment of notionism and judgment? We should enhance them not to replace the socio-didactic-cooperative system, but for replace the notionistic moment. If we manage to enhance the presence of these tools intelligently, we can finally free students from what is the strictly memorizing and notioned necessity: these content and this penniless knowledge can be obtained from new technologies, freeing the school community from the most routine and trivializing tasks, and enhancing the school as a place of construction of knowledge, culture, research, always, of course, in the research, enhancement of the group and sociality.
If the new technologies will free us from the notional obsession, the pupils finally can, together with their teachers, focus on the learning generated by being able and knowing how to deal with creative problems. If we manage to make this step, if even the parents, instead of suffering the intrusiveness of digital marketing they will make their voices heard, a future can be built where the boys will go to school to learn something new, unpublished, to find out, to look for, rather than sticker, instead of the old textbook, the same old textbook but on digital support.
