There are 100 Italian schools involved in the Digital Connections project, which aims to combat digital educational poverty in our country: the initiative is promoted by Save the Children in collaboration with the Crédit Agricole Group and supported by the Ministry of Education.
The problem of digital educational poverty
The need to focus on the issue of digital educational poverty emerged following the new conditions imposed by the health emergency, which led to the use of distance learning. Which for many kids has resulted in severe difficulties both because of the country’s infrastructure shortcomings on broadband and ultra-broadband connections and because a third of Italian families does not have a computer and internet access from home, as Istat highlighted.
Even worse, Italy is lagging behind development of digital skills of professors and students, who represent a key factor to successfully face today’s reality.
Digital educational poverty is a state of deprivation, he explained Cristiana de Paoli, Quality & innovation manager di Save the Children, that is, “the impossibility for young people to acquire the skills necessary to orient themselves in the world increasingly permeated by digital innovation”.
The phenomenon risks further marginalizing minors who already suffer from an educational disadvantage, deepening the rut with more fortunate peers, and create new exclusions and inequalities. The most penalized are adolescents and children who come from the southern regions and from poorer families and with less educated parents.
On the basis of these premises, as a response to the challenge of digital educational poverty, the Digital Connections project was born, which over a period of 3 years aims to involve 250 teachers and 6 thousand students between the ages of 12 and 14. The reason is that it is in this age group that the greatest criticalities are observed, as specified again by de Paoli: “In the transition from lower secondary school to high school, dropout and dropout begin to have a certain substance”. The goal is to provide children with a baggage they can count on to orient themselves in future choices and better manage this phase of study and growth.
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Measure digital skills
To identify digital educational poverty, Save the Children defined a new tool, called AbCd (i.e. Basic Self-Assessment of Digital Skills), in collaboration with the Research Center on Media Education, Innovation and Technology of the Catholic University of Milan and Monica Pratesi, professor of the University’s Department of Economics and Management of Pisa. The intention is to contribute to bridging the backwardness gap of Italy in this area, which does not yet have a digital skills assessment system.
Based on the AbCd, whose background I am the DigComp2.1 of the European Commission and the government document Curriculum di Civica Digitale, the first pilot survey on digital educational poverty in Italy was conducted, which involved a sample of 772 thirteen year olds from 11 cities Italian.
The results of the survey showed a landscape of serious shortcomings of young digital natives, many of whom are unable to insert a link in a text, share a screen during a call on Zoom, recognize a password of medium or high security and from distinguish fake news from real news. Furthermore, they do not know the rules relating to the transfer of their image on social networks and the minimum age to open an account on TikTok and Instagram.
In this picture, the school becomes a crucial place to free children from the risk of falling into the trap of digital educational poverty.
Stefano Pasta, professor of Methodology of training and special activities and among the representatives of the Digital Connections project, he underlined how important it is to clarify that “digital competence is not just a technical issue”. It is also about learning how one is on the Net and knowing and becoming aware of the criticalities of the online world. In short, the school must train digital citizenship, which as specified by Pasta has 3 dimensions: aesthetics (how you produce the content), criticism (which implies critical reading) ed ethics (which concerns the ways in which we live together with others and how we relate to the online space).
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The educational path
This is the educational approach that will be tested in the context of Digital Connections by 100 lower secondary schools, selected through a call to action. The project, which in the first year it foresees the participation of 40 institutes from 30 small and large cities in 15 different regions, it will allow students to carry out activities and lessons during the hours of Civics. The boys and girls, followed by teachers and flanked by educators from the Edi Onlus cooperative, will have videos, tutorials, apps, educational material and a platform created ad hoc to insert their works.
A real cross-media newsroom will be set up in the schools and students will learn how to produce a podcast, a write a Wikipedia entry and a petition online. In the topics covered, particular attention will be given to the rights and problems of the territory and the environment in which the children live.
At the end, the didactic path of the single pupil will be recorded and summarized on an e-portfolio e no certificates or licenses will be issued. Because the important thing, as de Paoli pointed out, is that the student “comes out with an awareness of the skills and competences acquired”.
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