In 2020, the emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic brought a drastic and sudden change in teaching practices, from the physical space of the classrooms to the virtual space of an e-environment. In this paper, through a qualitative analysis of 44 collected essays composed by Italian mathematics teachers from primary school to undergraduate level during the spring of 2020, we investigate how the Italian teachers perceived the changes due to the unexpected transition from a face-to-face setting to distance education. The analysis is carried out through a double theoretical lens, one concerning the whole didactic system where the knowledge at stake is mathematics and the other regarding affective aspects. The integration of the two theoretical perspectives allows us to identify key elements and their relations in the teachers’ narratives and to analyze how teachers have experienced and perceived the dramatic, drastic, and sudden change. The analysis shows the process going from the disruption of the educational setting to the teachers’ discovery of key aspects of the didactic system including the teacher’s roles, a reflection on mathematics and its teaching, and the attempt to reconstruct the didactic system in a new way.

This paper concerns with the use of digital storytelling in mathematics education as a competence-based methodology. It seems to be well apt to improve students’ capabilities be active solvers of real world problems, according to PISA framework. We present a storytelling model, which takes into account both research results about storytelling from pedagogical area and from story problems in mathematics education. According to the model, we present a use case, consisting in the implementation of a prototype. This latter has been made available to the Regional School Office of Campania (South of Italy) in the context of a project to support schools activities regarding mathematical literacy. Finally, we report some early students’ perceptions and discuss the constraints and limits of the prototype

Getting citizens prepared to emergencies, and especially children, is an essential issue which requires special attention in the educational process. Many evidences show that misconceptions about natural disaster and incorrect beliefs are often the basis for misguided actions that can lead to inefficient behaviours in case of dangerous events. Then school has a major role in the development of 'disaster-aware' citizens, since it is asked to design appropriate resources and select suitable methods able to guarantee retention and progression of the learning process. Teaching emergency preparedness involves studying several complex topics and more than some studies have shown that storytelling can be an effective method for teaching subjects that are intricate in nature. The educational technology considers research on construction of digital storytelling as an educational challenge. Digital narratives even gain noticeable importance when users' emotions are taken into account. Basing on these considerations, we propose in this work an adaptive, dynamic and narrative-based digital artefact in which emotions are used to rebalance the learners' status. We experimented this learning resource to teach earthquake preparedness in Italian secondary schools.

The construction of personalized courses taking into account needs and preferences of each learner is one of the most studied topics within the field of adaptive learning systems. Such systems assume that learning needs are well know by the teacher or, in self directed learning settings, that learners can easily determine and express own needs. Nevertheless, in real situations, learning needs often remain latent and, for this reason, unsatisfied. To overcome this limitation we propose in this paper a methodology and a prototype system enabling the elicitation of latent learning needs, as well as the automatic generation of learning experiences capable of satisfying such needs. The proposed methodology applies principles of recommending systems and also relies on a semantic representation of topics to be taught. The encouraging experimental results obtained with University students are also discussed.

This paper focuses the attention on a particular complex learning resource, namely storytelling that is characterized by its capability to support high-level learning processes thanks to a remediation of languages, strategies and roles. In the traditional forms of storytelling, a story is told to learners in a predefined way (also known as plot). This approach is called plot-based. An alternative approach is known as character-based. The plot-based approach fails to model the dynamic behaviors of virtual characters. On the other hand, the character-based approach focuses on designing the specific behaviors or actions of the virtual characters. In this work a Storytelling Design Model is defined in order to provide pedagogy-based guidelines to the design of Storytelling Complex Learning Objects taking care of both the plot-based and character-based approaches

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Context-aware e-learning is an educational model that foresees the selection of learning resources to make the e-learning content more relevant and suitable for the learner in his/her situation. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that an ontological approach can be used to define leaning contexts and to allow contextualizing learning experiences finding out relevant topics for each context. To do that, we defined a context model able to formally describe a learning context, an ontology-based model enabling the representation of a teaching domain (including context information) and a methodology to generate personalized and context-aware learning experiences starting from them. Based on these theoretical components we improved an existing system for personalized e-learning with contextualisation features and experimented it with real users in two University courses. The results obtained from this experimentation have been compared with those achieved by similar systems.