Postcard+(febbraio+2012)

=Using tablets to support administrative organization and didactic tasks=

“Guercino” school is located in a suburb about 25 minutes from the city centre of Bologna. It is a three-year middle school with a student population of approximately 550. About 20% of the students come from other countries, especially from Easter Europe. The faculty consists of nearly fifty full- and part-time teachers, plus some additional support staff employees.

Since the beginning of the ‘90s, ICT has been integrated into the overall strategy of school-life, transforming it into an ICT rich environment. The school has an ICT area with 50 PCs running Windows XP and IWB in each classroom. Staff rely heavily on ICT when delivering lessons, including the use of IWBs, various kind of softwares and web-based resources, and the e-learning platform Moodle. In a context where ICT is well integrated within the everyday teaching activities, Tablet Pilot project is an opportunity to improve our skills and to ponder on the use of tablets in the classroom.

The project will be carried out in a 6th year class, 1A. In this class there are 25 students, 11 boys and 14 girls, and 10 teachers. Eight students were not born in Italy, one student has profound cognitive impairment. Four teachers will be involved in the project: Prof. Roberto Agostini, Music teacher; Prof.ssa Daniela Leone, Maths and Science teacher, Prof.ssa Elisabetta Scala, English teacher, and Prof.ssa Cristiana Calà, support teacher.

The class has an IWB connected to a notebook. Since there will be only four tablets in the classroom available for four teachers, we will focus mainly on administrative tasks, on video and audio projects.
 * Teachers will use the tablets as a teacher’s gradebook and to keep the students’ attendance.
 * Teachers will use the tablets as a mean to share and work collaboratively.
 * Teachers will create video files of lessons to support subsequent revision and teaching. The students can insert their comments and share their thoughts with classmates. This could become a recovery tool for absent pupils or for those who need extra repetitions.
 * The child with learning difficulties can use tablet to augment materials with audio snippets and pictures.
 * Teachers and student can create tutorials on how to do certain things, for example how to use Moodle (the virtual learning environment we use at our school) or how to do certain Science experiments, how to make jewel crafts, how to play a song.

(We haven't received any tablet, so we couldn't start the project yet)