Telecom Italia will take part for the first time at the ABCD fair, where it will present its new Smart School solutions, the set of services for digitalizing classrooms and for the intelligent management and energy efficiency of school buildings, along with numerous innovative educational applications that are already being tested in several schools.
Smart School is the range of solutions for the digital school that can be implemented individually and autonomously according to a school’s needs: it includes solutions for the energy efficiency and protection of school buildings and for the digitalization of classrooms with MIBs – Multimedia Interactive Blackboards – and with all the accessories that are necessary to conduct classes in an innovative manner. The adoption of these solutions entails the use of advanced transmission technologies with a low infrastructural impact (such as PLC [Power Line Communication], that make use of existing electrical wiring, Plastic Fiber Optics [POF] and WiFi and ZigBee wireless transmission), without requiring new wiring, to enable the creation of an extensive LAN in a school. Smart School can make new models of educational and administrative management possible, through an innovative remote teaching application that enables interactive and multimedia classes with audio/video content to be held in virtual classrooms involving a teacher and pupils on-site or from a remote location (e.g. home, hospital). This solution was developed by Telecom Italia and is based on Adobe Flash applications that can run on just about any device. Smart School also includes an innovative web application that can optimize communications between schools and families and the management of school and administrative data, enabling prompt updates on school initiatives and activities and the real-time availability of information on pupils’ performance and absences from school.
Other new solutions will also be presented, in line with the purposes stated in the Memorandum of Understanding “for the implementation of initiatives supporting the National Digital School Plan " signed in 2010 by Telecom Italia and the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research: programs for promoting awareness on making better use of technologies and web browsing; pilot programs for creating digital content to complement and support traditional educational methods and training initiatives for teachers involved in processes of innovation. These solutions are two multimedia educational web applications.
The first one is a publishing “mash-up” application for creating innovative content that allows the aggregation of material directed towards the multichannel fruition of educational content. This application promotes and facilitates innovation in teaching methods and meets new learning needs. By experimenting new ways of conveying knowledge and new languages (e-books, videos, images, blogs, wiki), it can spur creativity and promote la collaboration between teachers and students. Trials of this application, already underway at Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples and ITI Buonarroti in Trento, will be extended over the course of the current 2011-2012 academic year to other schools, including Istituto Keynes in Castel Maggiore (Bologna) and the Da Vinci-Einstein middle school in Reggio Emilia.
The second web application to be presented is a "social reading" one whose functionalities allow the full sharing of the annotations made by one reader on an e-book with any other readers who are interested, both at a group level (e.g. a class or a school) and at a more general level of the entire readers’ community.
These two applications will be complemented by a solution that is already widespread internationally and that has received awards for being an innovative “blended” linguistic learning system. It is a platform for learning the English language that combines the characteristics of traditional teaching with the current potentialities of multimedia technology to help students develop the linguistic skills they need.
On the occasion of the event, Telecom Italia has set up a full-fledged multimedia classroom directly in the expo area, in which visitors can see and use both infrastructural elements (materials and connections) that have already been made available to schools (MIBs, PCs and Tablets, Wi-Fi kits) and educational platforms to be used in the field in the context of classes held during the fair.
Genoa, November 16, 2011
