Our meetings continue with Our School Professors. Today, we visit Milena Burgio in Sicily. Prof. Burgio teaches mathematics and science at the Istituto omnicomprensivo Angelo Musco first-degree secondary school in Catania. She is also a digital coordinator, POF and scientific lab manager at the school.
Milena brings her baggage of knowledge from the world of business (problem solving, organisation, enterprise and creativity) to her didactic activities and aims to catch her students’ attention through curiosity and the desire to learn and experiment with enthusiasm.
Together with a Piedmontese colleague, she introduced standardised testing (prove Invalsi) through an escape room, an environment that needs to be exited thanks to a “final key” obtained after having resolved enigma and quizzes along the way.
As usual, we share a short video in which Federico presents himself and then an interview with Ilaria Gaudiello, who coordinates the works of the open source community of teachers.
This is the eighteenth instalment of Professors in “Our School.”.
INTERVIEW
Milena, you are a creative teacher and support the importance of didactic experimentation to interest students in scientific subjects, even ludically. How have digital tools helped you to achieve this objective?
In teaching, I have always paid particular attention to the ludic and creative aspects. I always have bags full of scientific experiments and math labs based on everyday materials. The digital world is an important support to this activity. The myriad tools available allow students to consolidate what they have learnt, experiment and reinforce modelling and mathematics, as well as problem solving.
This year, as an innovating teacher, you are participating in the Fondazione Mondo Digitale’s “Our School” Community in which you have found synergies to develop new courses. We know that you are testing a gamification course on mathematics and soft skills with a colleague. Can you tell us something about it?
This year, I had the opportunity to develop and experiment together with a colleague from a school in Piedmont, a course dedicated to mathematics and soft skills. We developed an escape room based on math problems, part of which we obtained from the Italian standardised tests (Invalsi). Following an initial phase of study and experimentation with the digital tools, the students developed their own escape rooms and exchanged them amongst themselves. The students were enthusiastic about the project, worked in groups on storytelling and creatively developing the rooms with maths problems that required solving.
FMD’s “Our School” helps teachers to develop their “dream projects,” transforming didactic difficulties into opportunities. Are there other projects that you would like to develop with this open-source community?
I would love to test another gamification-based course involving teams and classes. I could organise a series of tests, even with physical tasks, to be completed over a given span of time on a common platform with periodic appointments for students to share their experiences.
