In brief: Sharing the experience made with 900 teachers and 600 students. Together we will explore the Moodle course created by Continuity (within the ComeInClasse project dedicated to training and professional use of free software in schools) and available to everyone, which includes watching the cartoon (or reading the book) and playing interactive games or exercises (memory games, crosswords, drag and drop, etc.).
I believe this workshop is considered very interesting by school leaders and teachers because it offers the possibility to have high-quality materials tested and produced with the support of teachers themselves, all available for free.
Last year at the SFSCON, we gathered some insights:
The book reading can be somewhat challenging for kindergarten children.
There is an unofficial version with a cartoon.
There is a dubbing project in Italian (led by Gabriele Ponzo, a very skilled and professional voice actor).
How could we help? We could have invested considerable time in this project and created conditions to leverage PNRR funds to promote free tools. To do this, we needed to create “something” that lasted at least 10 hours.
How could we keep primary and kindergarten children engaged for 10 hours (5 + 5 consecutive hours)?
So, we asked Gabriele for the video and dubbing, and he provided us with a wonderful, well-made product along with ongoing small improvements.
We created a Moodle course (available for anyone to have and use) divided into 4 modules.
Each module includes 7 minutes of video (the total video duration is 30 minutes).
After the video, we included various activities such as drawing (provided directly by FSFE), games or interactive exercises, and activities involving manual skills and movement: treasure hunts, dance, building a small robot with recycled materials.
We will show you the course and how to use it and offer some suggestions we found useful during our training sessions in South Tyrol/Alto Adige and throughout Italy, also sharing our notes or agenda if it can be of further help.
In the schools we visited, whenever possible, we involved local communities to support teachers in case they wanted to run the activities independently (without us) using Moodle and the course we provided. They are not obligated to complete a minimum of 10 hours and can use the course as they wish.
We managed to cover ten hours of early childhood education training with just the course (without the small robot). Despite the challenge and the high risk of failure, the appreciation was enormous, both for the valuable content conveyed by the book and because the children genuinely enjoyed themselves.
When we managed to make the little robots, the children literally went crazy!
We will prove it to you with concrete evidence 😀
We received many compliments and had confirmation that it was one of the most valid proposals adaptable to many of the key terms (concepts/objectives) present in various funding or financing grants (bandi e finanziamenti). To give a few examples: from inclusion to coding, from tinkering to civic or ethical education.
