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ESCHOOLING

ESchooling is an industrial research project by Telecom Italia SpA (the largest phone carrier in Italy) Edizioni Centro Studi Erickson SpA, Forteam Studio srl,SMEsMemetic Arl and University of Trento as scientific advisor, in part financed by the Autonomous province of Trento.The project is co­funded by the local government ( Autonomous province of Trento) through a provincial law on incentives for business

ITT Buonarroti took part:• in a former project named educ@tion run by Telecom Italia since 2011by which students were equipped with tablets and used them in class on a daily basis• at the current project eSchooling since 2014

The software produced by the project• is a web app living on the cloud • it does not need to be downloaded and installed on the teacher(or student) PC• it doesn't tight to a particular operating system or to a specific hardware device

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What is eSchooling?

Eschooling is a Competence­based approach to education in school leveraging Information and Communication Technology

It supports the whole teaching and learning lifecycle:• didactic project• assessment• metacognitive reflection

It supports all involved actors:• teachers• students• school directors• families

Teachers start with:• identify the Key Competence as learning goals• select appropriate learning activities• do on­going monitoring

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CBE: Competence Based Education

From indications contained in the " Key competences for Lifelong Learning­ European Reference Framework" ( European Commision 2006) , the governments of most EU countries created laws for pushing schools to introduce the notion of competence in the teaching processes

A competence­based approach involves a profund change in the teaching style and practice

CBE stimulates authentic and self­directed learning

CBE requires different didactical appraches and different kinds of learning tasks

Teachers must become a facilitator of the process• providing students with a variety of relevant and authentic learning experiences• stimulating students, who often work in groups, to use these experiences to build their own understanding and to develop competences

For teachers CBE• involves changing the beliefs about knowlewdge, teaching, learning and assessment• requires the adoption of a new and broader didactical repertoire

Cons:• many educators perceive it as pushed by companies and industries and is therefore unsuited for "nobler", i.e. non vocational education system ( such as e.g. lyceum)• many teachers perceive CBE as an approach that focuses only the ability of "doing things"• time devoted to students activity is subtracted from the total available time to cover the whole "program"

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The project attempt to use Information and Technology (ICT) to support teaching and learning processes

The prominent aim is to help teachers and schools to • change the way they set up their educational plans (e.g. curricula)• change the pedagogic­didactical repertoire from a maily traditional trasmission model to more active didactics, based on constructivist learning theories

The software prototype aims at supporting teachers • in the formal steps required by the new legislative aspects• to design and implement didactic strategies suited for competence­based teaching and assessment

Does the project help?

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What are competencies (or competences) in Europe?

According to the Oxford dictionary competence ( or competency) is "the ability to do something successfully or efficiently"

Competence indicated sufficiency of knowledge and skills that enable someone to act in a wide variety of situations

It was introduced already in the Seventies (e.g. Grant 1979) to fill the gap between education and labour market starting from the world of Vocational Education and Training (VET)

The development of the concept followed relatively indipendent routes in Western Europe

The United Kingdom adopted a competence­based approach to VET to estabilish a nation­wide unified system of work­based qualification in the 1980s

The German model, which then influenced Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and the Scandinavian countries, has its roots even earlier, in the 1960s.It was based on Qualification and Kompetenz

In the new century it envolved into subject­competence (Fachcompetenz), personal competence ( Personalcompetenz) and social competence ( Sozialcompetenz)

In France the modification of ROME ( Repertoire operationnel des metiers et des emplois) in 1993 gave a central role to competence

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Developmental psychologists ( e.g.Ggelman & Greeno 1989; Sophian, 1997) commonly break competence down into three analytically distinct components

• "Knowledge": conceptual competence, rule­based, abstract knowledge about an entire domain• "Skills": procedural competence, procedures and skills needed to apply conceptual competence in concrete situations• "Competencies": performance competences, required to assess a problem and select a suitable strategy for its solution

Lets define properly what "competency"is

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Competence Based Education in the Italian context

In 2006 the EU members States developed the prevision of " key competences for all" as part of their lifelong learning strategies.

A European Reference framework was developed and approved as Recommendation of the European parliament and of the Council in 2006( European Commision, 2006)

It defines eight key competences and describes the essential knowledge, skills and attitudes related to each of these:

1.Communication in the mother tongue

2.Communication in foreign language

3.Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology

4.Digital competence

5.Learning to learn

6.Social and civic competences

7.Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship

8.Cultural awareness and expression

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The final goal was to have comparable competence assessment so as to facilitate workers mobility across the nations

Every state has customized the implementation of the competence concept in order to adapt the framework to its specific cultural tradition

In Italy a Ministry Decree ( DM 139, 2007) introduced in the school system the key competences leaving to schools and to teachers much freedom about how to implement them

The competence body was spit into• four sets "Assi Culturali" (AC) ( cultural dimensions)• eight " Competenze Chiave di Cittadinanza" (CCC) (citizenship key competence)

AC broadly cover four disciplinary areas: languages, science, and technology, mathematics and history

Each of them is articulated in three to four competences: the total number of competences forseen by the Italian law is 22 ( against the 8 European ones)

Comparison between the EU key competences and the Italian framework

s

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The Italian tsunami

The law (DM 9, Jan 17, 2010) prescribes that the competences must be certified at the end of the 10­years period of compulsory schooling

The competence certification is a due act, but it is performed in parallel to the classical yearly student evaluation, which is tipically based on knowledge acquired by the student

Titles are given at the end of the 8th and the 13th years

Most teachers are not eager to dedicate much time to this activity

"Competence"evaluation is almost always nothing but a trivial mapping from result of traditional, content­based assessments onto the "competence box"

The final exam "maturità" at the end of the 5th year of high school • still has an old­fashioned imprinting• assesses the acquisition of knowledge• hence teachers obviously feel obliged to prepare students for that

Teacher are constantly told that they should incorporate competences in their teachingDecree of 2012 says:"The Eu key competences framework is the horizon at which the Italian school system aims" ( DM 245 2012)

Bottani ( 2007) mentioned a "pedagogical tsunami" caused by the big but largely incoherent amount of work done on the notion of competence

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Eventhough the European Commision states that "technology allows for new ways of learning and assessing, focussing more on what the learner is capable of doing (European Commission 2013) , no relevant effort has been dedicated to using ICT to favour and support CBE

ESchooling supports the transition from traditional didactics to a competence­centred pedagogy.

This enables a BYOD (Bring Your own Device) approach and the use of mobile technologies

CBE vs ICT enabling a BYOD approach

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Eschooling accompanies teachers while:

• defining learning objectives related to key Competences to guide their teaching

• planning competence teaching

• designing and assigning activities in the CBE spirit

• accessing and sharing educational resources

• accessing and sharing best practices

• performing competence evaluation ( and, when required, competence self evaluation)

• cooperating with colleagues

Why eSchooling? Lets summarize

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ESchooling at a high school level: part 1

For every class, every teacher has to prepare , at the beginning of the school year, an overall plan of what they intend to do. The plan must include the competences they intend to develop.

At the end of the second year, a competence balance document has to be prepared for each student.

ESchooling provides a taxonomy of competences, starting from the European key competences and decomposing them into sub­competencies.

Teachers can select the competences from the taxonomy ( classification system) and import them in a document, which become the skeleton of their plan.

Once this operation is complete, the system "knows" the teachers' declaration, and can support them in performing class activity.

A wizard helps in this phase and requests the teacher to identify sub­competences related to the activity

An activity usually includes educational resources, which can be accessed over the Internet or through the eSchooling repository.

For the assessment eSchooling proposes rubrics, which are an evaluation technique especially suited for competence evaluation (Goodrich, 1996; Pandero&Jonsson, 2013)

Teacher valuation of the rubric is kept in the eSchooling databases.

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Part 2

The sharing of contents and learning materials is enabled by a common library with a relatively flexible policy of accessibility levels,that may list and link:• files physically stored in the system library• contents linked from learning object repositories, tools, web sites, etc.

To address the students' different learning style, eSchooling presents a funtionality to self­evaluate each student learning style according to the Kolb or Gardner approach.The outcome of the Kolb test can be used to stimulate metacognitive reflection in the students

Also, it can be useful for composing groups ( homogeneous groups or balanced ones)Evaluation results are reported in various graphs: radar plots offer simple and easy to understand evidence of competence performance for each pupil and for each class or even school.

Teachers• have quick representation of the results of the activities they perform• get a quick idea also of what their colleagues are doing and on how they are evaluating the different competences for the shared pupils/classes.

Students can reason on their individual performance

Having collected data enables using learning analytics techniques

The final recommendations of the European Project Keyconet ( Key Competence Network of School Education ) released in December 2014, turned out to be in a surprisingly exellent accord with the ideas on which eSchooling is based.

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From the report of the Kolb test, choosing "learning style", the "learning orientation" is visualized for each student by a graph

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Clicking on "profile" for the same user is defined a learning profile through a graph, also better explained by a key

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From the report, selecting "assessment of competencies" and the reference macro competency for a class, a radar diagram is created

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A radar diagram for "assessment of competencies" can be created for a single student of the class

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From the report selecting "competence profile" for a given period of the school year, the system provides a screen for the class with the average assessments of the competencies for the different cultural axis

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Profile for each student useful for the final certification

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THANK YOU!

Bibliography"ESCHOOLING: an ICT­ based approach to competence ­ based education(Marco Ronchetti, Giovanna Chiozzi, Roberto Gris; ENCYCLOPAIDEIA XIX,43­45, 2015)"

Piera Seiser ­ Physics teacherSchool guidance supervisor for laboratories Blended Learning/Digital Learning/Clil

ITT M. Buonarroti ­ Departement of Physicstel. 0461 216811

piera.seiser@scuole.provincia.tn.ithttps://it.linkedin.com/in/pieraseiser