The tendency to perceive the physical and the digital world as separate, adopting an attitude of “digital dualism” keeps alive the prejudice towards a functional use of technology, limiting both the exploration of the possibilities of digital and a timely analysis of the real problems produced by the continuous connection. Instead, it is necessary to start from the awareness of living in an augmented reality, where digital and physical, technologies and bodies, off and online often intersect with relevant effects in terms of relationships, emotions, ability to learn and know.

START-DS Deliverables: 

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  • Needs analysis – Our project is based on the collaboration and co-creation of targeted actions and research-action activities that see the integration of different skills and abilities by the partners involved. The first part of the project allows a shared needs analysis that represents the ground of experience at school – learning and teaching, social skills and digital devices at school – that we would address with our specific actions. The target groups are formed by adolescents, teachers and high school principals in the selected countries. We will involve 500-600 European high school students, 80-100 European teachers and 15 European School Leaders to explore not only their specific needs but also their ideas and their imaginative competencies in creating solutions suitable for the future of education.

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  • Actions in class – provides for the implementation of individualized actions in schools to encourage a virtuous use of smartphones and digital devices in teaching. Prohibitions on the use of smartphones, like any other prohibition imposed especially in adolescence, have the effect of fixing the thought towards the inaccessible object, potentially making the student less involved in the lesson. On the contrary, our actions try to integrate the time spent in the classroom and at school with the habits experienced in an extra-school environment by means of the use and the management of smartphones during scholastic activities to evaluate the impact of technology on the co-construction of educational activities. Each action will allow us to better observe the positive and negative repercussions of smartphone use in the learning/teaching process, improving social and educational skills. Cooperative learning will be challenged by the use of smartphones in approaching curricular disciplines like math and grammar. Not only Cooperative learning but also soft skills will be challenged by smartphone use in class. Real-life chats will be used to close the social life of adolescents about school time and their own social life in class with their classmates. Using the technique of debate, students can improve their reflection and awareness about themselves and others. From an affective point of view, a targeted teaching digitalization could arouse a greater emotional involvement and positive emotions during the learning process thanks to short-term video and audio content, foster cognitive and emotional involvement in teacher-student interaction, promote peer collaboration, stimulate peer-learning initiatives that foster debate, social skills and collaboration. 

• • Dear-Io & VOICE-DS – The originality of the products is what makes our proposal innovative. Our project proposes two new products dedicated to the improvement of active awareness of the protagonists of the education process (students, teachers and principals) in facing digital challenges and transformation:
    • DEAR-IO APP – Through Dear-Io, adolescents will increase their soft skills through the use of a serious game and will experience a space dedicated to self-reflection, a digital diary that allows to improve awareness and the ability to process emotions through suggestions originating from psychoanalytic theories. To allow adolescents to manage and balance the immediacy and hyperconnection guaranteed from social media responsible for the profound cultural transformation, the smartphone have to becomes an anaclitic support for the experience and exploration of its own inner world and emotions, making a direct contribution to their intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics, with positive repercussions in school and extracurricular context.
    • VOICE-DS Vademecum – The VOICE- DS Vademecum addressed to teachers and principals will contain the best practices implemented in the European schools and the answers by legal experts, educators and psychologists to the most frequent questions of School Leaders concerning the regulation of the use of mobile phones in the classroom.