Listen to the audio version of the article
Also thanks to the arrival of ChatGPT, almost all students say they know artificial intelligence. But then, if you ask them to explain it, much more than half of them don’t know what it actually is. However, AI is making inroads among younger people who are also starting to use it at school, but 58% did so on their own initiative, only a quarter did so in class or at the instigation of teachers. Two out of three students have already used it at least once to do their homework at school and the same percentage of kids look with confidence to the new technological frontier, convinced that it can bring more benefits than risks.
The results of a survey by YouTrend on behalf of the Learning Learning Digitale Study Center, which involved around 1,300 students throughout Italy, are a first snapshot of the attitude that young people have towards artificial intelligence, based on trust and putting it to the test ” hands on”, but also still denounces a large knowledge gap that must be filled to arrive at a knowledge that can enable a conscious and profitable use of the technology that promises to further transform the world of work, involving also the intellectual professions.
The results of the survey, presented during the first day of the General States of the digital school in Bergamo, will be made available to the Ministry of Education, involved in the revision of the 2015 National Digital School Plan in a second version called to define the architecture of a school inspired by digital innovation, which knows how to introduce children to advanced IT skills, suited to the needs of an ever-changing world of work, but which knows how to use them to make teaching more engaging and inclusive. In this sense, a substantial chapter of the new plan will be dedicated to artificial intelligence.
The framework of the new Digital School Plan is all the more relevant since the school has a volume of resources available to it never seen before all together, thanks to the Pnrr. European funds make available 2.1 billion euros for the School Plan 4.0 to transform 100 thousand traditional classes into environments open to innovative learning, 1.1 billion to support multilingual knowledge, STEM subjects and equal opportunities and 261 million for the connection of schools.
The distribution of PNSD resources in the 2015-22 period provides crucial indications to avoid the mistakes of the past: of the 386 million made available only 18% was directed towards the training of teachers and student skills, the remaining 82% was went for the instrumentation, as underlined by Gianna Barbieri, general director of the Ministry of Education who outlined the process started for the revision of the National Digital School Plan. “Schools have purchased a lot of hardware and little software to use those tools, often without having a clear underlying innovation project – underlines the president of LearnDigitale Dianora Bardi -. Thus the training focused on the use of the tools and this basis was fundamental for continuing the school even during the lockdown, together with the great availability of the teachers. But now we need to take a further step to allow teachers to understand how to exploit the enormous potential of that endowment to create innovative teaching, capable of involving students in new ways, in a strategy that defines purposes and needs at the beginning”.