Bologna - More e-learning in schools in Emilia-Romagna. In these weeks of forced suspension of lessons due to the Coronavirus emergency, the e-learning mode represents an opportunity to maintain an educational relationship with the school. A "virtual classroom" in which everyone will be connected from home.
The tools to support the distance learning activity are provided by Google and Cisco: thanks to an agreement between the Region, the Regional School Office for Emilia-Romagna and Lepida, the two IT giants will make them available to the regional educational institutions of all levels, state and private, as early as Tuesday, March 10th and free of charge. Students will be able to send videos, power points or written texts, find the assigned tasks and corrections. And teachers will meet in virtual "rooms", also meeting parents online.
"We are trying - Regional President Stefano Bonaccini and Regional Assessor for School, University, Research and Digital Agenda Paola Salomoni explain - to give support to schools all over the territory to face this moment of emergency which involves, among other measures, the suspension of lessons for all the students of Emilia-Romagna".
"We have proceeded in two directions - President and Assessor add - together with the Regional School Office and Lepida and in collaboration with IT companies: first of all enabling all schools to activate appropriate virtual classes, and at the same time providing teachers with training tools to work on the e-learning platform. An action that aims to support teaching continuity and student participation in the school community".
"The schools of Emilia-Romagna are at the top, at the national level, in the use of digital technologies in teaching, as stated by the Agicom 2019 report. The Coronavirus emergency and the suspension of teaching activities, in the undoubted difficulties that they pose - says Director of the Regional School Office Stefano Versari - pushes us to further accelerate these initiatives. For this reason, we decided to make digital tools immediately available to schools that do not have them, on the basis of the proposals received so far from Google and Cisco and further proposals that may come. On the market there are multiple platforms that permit distance learning activities, with different modalities, quality and costs. Therefore, we do not intend to direct the free technical and economic choices of educational institutions. Rather, to start a path for the widespread use of instruments for distance education".
"In a very short time we have made it possible for all schools in Emilia-Romagna to access free services to carry out distance teaching activities and meetings with teachers, representatives and parents. This - explains Director of Lepida Gianluca Mazzini - is facilitated also thanks to the Lepida Ultra Wide Band infrastructure, already available in over 1.200 school premises in Emilia-Romagna, which allows school operators to access quality digital services. A further confirmation of the important role that digital technologies play at the service of the entire regional community".
How it works
From Tuesday, March 10th, services for distance learning activities can be activated free of charge upon request, thanks to the G Suite for Education, a set of Google tools and services created specifically for schools and online education and for distant communication activities thanks to CISCO WebEx, a professional platform for the management of audio-video meetings with a high number of participants.
Distance learning activities via Google Suite are already active in about 300 of the 535 state schools in the region, with an average activation time of 4-5 days.
Thanks to the collaboration between Lepida, Google Italia and its partners, schools in the region can join the service by filling the forms available at https://gsuite.google.com/signup/edu/welcome#0.
This way it will be possible to obtain the activation of the platform in fast track mode, that is, accelerating the activation procedure.
For any problem in filling the form, a temporary support service by Lepida is available via email at supporto-scuole@lepida.it.
The Cisco Webex Platform
Cisco Webex is a platform that allows multiple people to collaborate remotely in a simple and secure way. It combines audio conferencing, web conferencing and videoconferencing features. The platform is available globally and already supports over 100 million meetings per month.
Webex is a secure platform, both in terms of data encryption and user privacy, interoperable with other applications and collaboration tools. It enables advanced administrative management of every single school.
With Cisco Webex the meeting takes place in a virtual room that provides all the digital tools for advanced collaboration between the participants of the meeting: it shows documents, applications and multimedia content; it manages chats with questions and answers; it offers a sort of "virtual whiteboard"; it records the sessions and allows them to be reviewed with high audio-video quality.
CiscoWebex provides schools in Emilia-Romagna with a virtual “room” for organizational and teaching activities as well as online meetings and exchanges and, for secondary schools, more rooms for each single institute that teachers can use to manage activities with the classes. The proposal provides remote technical support for the schools that will join. The Regional School Office will collect requests for access from educational institutions.
Both services can be used from any device: personal computer, tablet or smartphone, equipped with the most popular operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS). The support related to the G Suite Education involves the start-up phase of the platform, which then remains available to the school. The Cisco Webex services will be available for free until June 2020.
