Next generation class - innovative learning environments

School 4.0: innovative schools, wiring, new classrooms and workshops (Mission 4, Component 1, Investment 3.2)

Italy’s Recovery and Resilience Plan provides for updating school facilities into adaptable, flexible and digital learning environments, with technologically advanced workshops and a work-based learning process.

This measure accelerates the digital transition of the Italian school system with four initiatives:

- Transformation of around 100 000 traditional classes into connected learning environments, with the introduction of related educational devices

- Creation of workshops for digital professions in the second cycle

- Digitalization of school administrations - Interior wiring cabling of approximately 40 000 school buildings and related devices.

The investment is financed by Italy’s Recovery and Resilience plan by EUR 2.1 billion.

As parte of this investment, the project aims at the creation of innovative learning environments is part of this investment, and it is done in order to accommodate and meet the needs of students and ensure the educational success of each student.

The project is in synergy with the innovative path started in previous years with funding for projects related to PON and PNSD, and wants to create an "educational ecosystem" inclusive and laboratory, in which each student can implement critical thinking, computational, divergent, creative, media literacy and basic skills, consistent with the educational goals inherent in the pdm and the ptof.

Consequently, the search for solutions, the elaboration of artefacts between equals, becomes the object of experimentation, reasoning and communication in flexible, interconnected and collaborative contexts.

Therefore a new classroom setting is outlined, permeated by innovative teaching practices inspired by recent pedagogies such as hybrid, experiential, computational, multiliteracy learning.

Teaching methodologies such as IBSE, Problem solving, Project Based Learning, Peer tutoring, Laboratory teaching, Digital Storytelling, Coding, Educational robotics, Gamification, Debate and Tinkering transform the classroom into a teaching workshop, in which the centrality and the protagonism of students are implemented in experiential and constructive activities of knowledge, through the use of digital instrumentation.

The classrooms will have flexible configurations, remodulable within the various environments, to adopt innovative teaching methodologies and variable discipline by discipline.

Students will thus be involved in disciplinary and interdisciplinary activities based on the investigation, the detection and understanding of natural and scientific phenomena, but also on the design and processing of artifacts that will take "life" in natural realities (physical) and artificial environments (digital, VR/AR/MR).

The languages of mathematics, science, technology, engineering and programming go beyond the boundaries of digital humanities.

Significant will be the flexible organization of students, in plenary and in groups, where the teacher becomes a facilitator, tutor and organizer of the path.

In this multimedia, inclusive and interactive space the school affirms itself as Civic Center contributing to the education of an active, aware, digital and creative citizenship.