Today, our weekly appointment with “Our School” Professors takes us to Emilia Romagna to meet Nicoletta Rossi, a Professor of IT and Technology at the Istituto Tecnico Economico Giambattista Bodoni in Parma, where she is also responsible for the strategic European certifications sector.
As usual, we share a short presentation video and then an interview conducted by Ilaria Gaudiello, who coordinates the works of the open source community of teachers and educators.
INTERVIEW
Nicoletta, what does teaching mean to you and how has “Our School” been useful to consolidate your vision of didactic activities?
Teaching means helping my students to fly away. I have to show them what I want them to learn, but also give them the opportunity to learn as they prefer. I teach a subject, computer science, that is very practical, but also creative. It is essential that they create using their imagination and problem solving, as long as they manage to keep it real. What I mean is that if in an imaginary interview I were to ask Michelangelo to create a water fountain, he would do it his way, but it would still have to allow people to drink!
In order to reach this result, the experience with “Our School” has allowed me to experiment with a project that I have had in my back pocket for a long time. It was fundamental. The support by the Fondazione Mondo Digitale for the development of a course that could involve a class of unmotivated students using free technology and new approaches was extremely useful.
Can you briefly describe the project you developed with your students?
The students created to apps for didactic activities. They had fun and learned a lot. Moreover, this project gave us the idea to create a kit so that other teachers could replicate the experience and take advantage of all the solutions that we identified.
What is your ideal school?
I dream of a school that is free from its role of surveillance and order, a school that is based on collaboration. What I mean is that teachers have always been responsible for the conduct of students (this is often a hard job that places a great responsibility on teachers) and top-down teaching. However, students should really be allowed to learn about what they are really interested in, what they believe is important, not just because something is mandatory. School should be composed of teams of individuals striving to reach a common objective. This is my dream, but one that if it were achieved would lead us to double the results with half the trouble!
