With the implementation of Integrated Digital Teaching for all school orders (DM 39/2020 and DM 89/2020), learning and digitization settings can be combined with the design of frontal and remote educational actions, allowing for better accessibility and inclusion. Universal Design for Learning is a model for building products and environments accessible to anyone as widely as possible, without the need for specialized planning or adaptations. In the pedagogical field, UDL is also a methodology that can be used to promote a fully inclusive curriculum, through a new interpretation of teaching-learning processes and strategic and reasoned use of technologies. The authors believe that Universal Design for Learning can support the implementation of integrated digital teaching.
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Guidelines for Integrated Digital Teaching
Starting from experience matured even during the lockdown, in our country the Minister of Education provided a reference framework for planning the resumption of activities for the new year 2020-21, by Ministerial Decree no. 39 of 26 June 2020. Below, with DM 89/2020, the Guidelines for integrated digital teaching have been issued, with operational indications so that each school can equip itself with a suitable school plan.
The Guidelines define Integrated Digital Teaching as an “innovative teaching-learning methodology”, complementary to the school experience both in presence and at a distance, which must be integrated and strengthened through the support of digital devices and new technologies. The DDI has the primary objective of ensuring sustainability of the so proposed activities and particular attention to fragile students and inclusive processes.
Integrated Digital Teaching primarily involves secondary school students, but also pupils of all school orders, should it be necessary to contain the sanitary emergency.
The school plan for DDI must be integrated with the triennial plan of formative offer (PTOF); it provides, from an organizational point of view, for a preventive research of technological devices and connectivity needs, the adoption of transparent application criteria and the protection of personal data.
The plan for DDI must take into account the needs of all pupils, first of all safeguarding situations of difficulty at any level, guaranteeing school attendance in the presence and promoting the planning of home educational paths shared with the competent local structures. For this purpose it identifies the principles and methods for redesigning methodologies, learning environments and specific activities.
The educational programming is thus optimized respecting the learning rhythms, integrating the didactic activities in presence with those at a distance, in synchronous and asynchronous mode; it can therefore understand that distance teaching is just one of the tools that DDI use to promote a structurally inclusive formative offer.
Main Elements Of Integrated Digital Teaching
The essential elements of a digitally integrated educational-didactic plan can be identified above all in a flexible classroom setting: furniture that is not fixed but mobile, chairs and benches with wheels so as to easily create various group aggregations, desks with unusual shapes, use of colors in the furnishings to make the environment pleasant, motivating and engaging.
Obviously, the possibility of using - by students and teachers - any personal electronic device (smartphone, tablet, portable PC) in integration with the technological equipment of the school, is implicit, thanks to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) perspective expressly provided by the National Digital School Plan (introduced by Law 107/15).
There is an evident need to adopt active teaching methodologies, typical of a pedagogical approach based on reality tasks and concrete experiential practices, which require interdisciplinary skills as well as collaborative and cooperative skills.
The strategic methodological support is given by Web Based Learning (WBL), which indicates a teaching-learning process that uses the resources available on the Web as educational offer tool, permitting to open traditional classroom activities to flexible formative courses, placing the students at the centre of the educational process.
Additional elements of the DDI can be identified in an essential curriculum and in the need for changes in the processes of assessing the knowledge, skills and competences that students will be able to acquire while moving in unconventional learning environments.