This year I am going to celebrate my “sixth birthday” as a Scieintix ambassador and for this reason, I organized an activity to involve as many as possible STEM teachers from my region in SDC2022. I am one of the Scientix ambassadors from Campania, an Italian region in the south of Italy, and before the covid pandemic together with the other ambassadors, we managed to organize workshops or events to present Sceintix to Campanian teachers. To organize this event we collaborate with ANISNCampania and Caserta Planetarium, trying to highlight the relevance of networking in STEM. But during the pandemic, it was very difficult to work together, due to the time needed to organize online lessons and all the other teaching activities.
From September 2021 I started a new job! because I was selected as a member of Equipe formativa Territoriale, (EFT ) a group of 200 teachers from all around Italy that work to support transformation in education with a focus on promoting the use of digital tools in teaching. I am part of the EFT Campania, and I think this was the occasion to re-start dissemination about Sceintix to Campanian teachers!
For this reason, I dedicate a webinar, held on 29 March, from the Spring digital Campain, organized by EFT Campania. on SDC2022. The webinar topic was how to participate in the STEM Discovery Campaign 2022. This was the occasion to introduce to scientix a new group of Campania teachers that have been never involved in our previous activity as scientix ambassadors. First of all, I presented them Scientix repository! because teachers are always looking for new activities ready to be used in class! and I invite them in participating in the Translation Campain to increase the number of resources translated into Italian. Afterward, we discuss relevant points in STEM education, the collaboration between STEM teachers, and how to integrate STEM topics. I have to say that the participants in the webinar have no doubt, as you can see from the image created by a digistorm
(moltissimo= so much molto= a lot tantissimo = so much)
Even if collaboration is so important in STEM in Italian upper secondary school it could be really complicated, and we discuss which strategy could be used. From 2021 in Italy we have compulsory activities of civic education, and this was my suggestion ad opportunity for STEM teachers working with the same student group to collaborate. Moreover, as Equipe formativa Territoriale, (EFT ) this year we work on a competition for teachers called Innovamenti, to engage them in using innovative teaching methodology. As an example, we proposed civic education activities based on all the teaching methodologies proposed. If you want to have a look at Italian teachers’ work you can search the #innovamenti on Twitter and Instagram.
Finally, during the workshop, we discussed other ways to integrate STEM activities from different topics, and participants were invited to share their work o a digipad. It seems that collaboration was very important also for these activities, as was underlined by a participant that talked about her experience in and Etwinning project, which helped so much also at the beginning of the pandemic when she has to organize online teaching activities.
As usual, at the end of the webinar, in which have been involved 35 teachers, te we took a virtual photo group, I ask participants to create an avatar with digiface and upload it on a shared digital board. Teachers seem shy but someone has added their “face” in the photo.
I was really happy to have the opportunity to come back to disseminate Scientix between Campanian teachers, and I hope they will contribute to SDC2022 and start to participate in other scientix activities.