Digital Learning in classroom: diffusion, use and evaluation of digital learning environments in Apulian schools

This work is part of researches about Learning Management System as support to didactics. A clear and careful analysis of the context is important to favour and improve the use of technologies as support to didactics. The purpose of this inquiry is to represent the stage of the preliminary analysis, showing the current situation of the analyzed context . Then, it wants to highlight the most important problems in order to find possible solutions. This work can be considered a census of the schools of the region, so that the widespread of digital learning in the situation analyzed could be identified.It wants to understand how scholastic institutions use these tools and evaluate their efficacy. The inquiry has been carried out with a multiple choice questionnaire and which has been released online thanks to “Ufficio scolastico Regionale” of Apulia. Considering the results of the first 160 questionnaires, it is clear that the widespread of Learning Management System in Apulian schools is not broad, but it could be considered an achievement. In fact 20% of the sampled schools use LMS, but in High Schools the rate reaches almost 50%: this data shows that the attention given to technologies as a support to didactics is high. Even if the widespread is quite satisfying, the data about the use of Learning Management System are less positive. Sometimes there is more attention to the storage and sharing features rather than to collaborative learning features. In summary, a positive evaluation of this inquiry is possible: this work could be considered the beginning of possible actions to raise public awareness towards the Pedagogical Potential offered by Digital Learning.