Teachers and new technologies: the narrow path between tradition and innovation

This paper intends to contribute to the debate about teaching staff professional updating, focusing in particular on training to the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), as an instrument for in-presence educational purposes, and as a mediation means in teachers’ training process. This is a living matter, considering that in 2002, within the framework of the Lisbon Strategy, the Minister of Education of the European Union had prepared a work programme, entitled “Education and Training 2010”, whose main objective consisted in upgrading teachers’ training (from the very beginning of their career) with a view to their continuous professional development, and the awareness that they are called to play a leading role in educational and training system innovation. In addition, further papers issued by the European Commission have underlined teachers’ need to gain the basic skills in the use of computers and new online working and communication means, as well as an in-depth knowledge about the connections existing between teaching activities and new technologies. This means that a greater familiarity with ICTs would allow teachers to effectively integrate them in learning and teaching. In addition, thanks to the experience they have personally made, they would be able to develop educational strategies aimed at better meeting learners’ needs, and at teaching them how to become autonomous lifelong learners. Basing on these assumptions, this paper presents an evaluative study dealing with “PuntoEdu Apprendimenti di Base”, a blended training course addressed to secondary school teachers and to those who teach in the first two years of the upper-secondary school, focused on the three disciplinary areas of Italian, Mathematics and Science. This project, which represents an answer to the lack of basic learning pointed out by the OCSE Pisa Survey carried out among Italian students, aims at providing teachers with appropriate teaching instruments, and at developing their educationalmethodological expertise for the purpose of supporting young people’s learning process and improving and personalize their individual professional skills. By combining the results collected through a questionnaire, a focus group with students, and several e-mail interviews to the forum moderators, this paper presents an overall evaluation of the PuntoEdu platform based on the effectiveness and efficiency of the course, of online communication tools (forum, chat, breeze live, virtual class) and the alternation of in-presence and online class meetings. The aim being to identify which online tools and learning methods have facilitated teachers in attending the training course, and which, instead, have made the attainment of learning goals difficult. Furthermore, this evaluation has allowed identifying some improvements to be brought in order to design a blended course capable to meet users’ specific needs on the basis of their professional profiles, their cultural background and their individual differences. All this leads us to consider the relation between theory and practice a critical matter, as theory and practice are today an indivisible pair in teachers’ professional development, and confirm the considerable advantages brought by the leaning-by-doing approach. Contradicting the commonplaces on the de-humanizing effects of technology and the frequent charge of “rigidity” brought to teachers (due to their standardized professional habits and their autocratic management of students’ professional and educational training paths), the PuntoEdu experience underlines, instead, teachers’ wishes to experiment alternative teaching methods through effective cooperation and an appropriate use of online educational tools aimed at establishing and developing relations, including the opportunity to become members of a knowledge-building community.