ONLINE LEARNING IN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: TEACHER REPRESENTATIONS AND TECHNOLOGICAL INSTRUMENTS

Online teaching has become the fundamental teaching tool during the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to guarantee the right to study, educational institutions have quickly tried to change the teaching-learning methods and digital tools already possessed. This modality required wide technological skills and a reorganization of the educational objectives of the school and family context. This paper aims to present the online teaching methods implemented, the teaching profession, the pros and cons of online teaching-learning processes, and the digital tools chosen by schools and teachers to promote inclusive learning. The study involved 284 teachers from kindergarten to secondary school in the Italian context. Questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were carried out between April 2020 and June 2020. The data analyzed show that all educational institutions have adopted at distance teaching-learning devices to avoid the collapse of the scholastic system by March 2020. Teachers reported that they initially sought to reproduce face-to-face teaching strategies in the online contexts. This allowed teachers to work in their comfort zone, but did not promote long-term results. The data shows an increase in the representations of the workload and a lowering of students’ learning results. The difficulty in differentiating the school context from the family one emerged. The technological devices and platforms chosen often did not have the necessary functionalities to reproduce an in presence teaching-learning process. Sometimes the functionalities were not known by teachers to be fully applied. The family-school relationship has changed, becoming more informal and continuous during the day. All respondents agree that the teaching strategies chosen during the first phases of the pandemic were emergency strategies that have fastly attempted to promote learning and interaction. The tools and methodologies of online teaching are not the same as those of school teaching in presence. The importance of digital pedagogy and the need to include it in training programs to prepare future teachers for the light in the new social reality is fundamental.