Istituto Comprensivo Statale G. Ungaretti
Melzo, Italy
Lifting students up by moving teachers forward.
Istituto Comprensivo Statale G. Ungaretti is a public school serving a local community in Melzo, a former industrial town with a high proportion of low-income families. The school has 1,100 students aged 3-14 years old, and 10 per cent are learning with special needs.
To best prepare all of its students for success in the modern world, the school’s leadership is on a mission to provide exceptional learning through equal access to digital tools. They chose to invest in Apple technology because of the flexibility and versatility that iPad offers their students — and for the ongoing programmes that support teacher development.
“Traditional learning approaches that remain commonplace in Italy are failing to prepare some children for the modern world, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
Enter Apple Professional Learning. The school uses its free tools and resources to ensure educators are getting the most out of Apple technology. For existing staff, the learning is intuitive and easy to adopt, and for future faculty members, it’s fully supportive of their development and growth. After initial advice from district experts, the school now hosts its own hands-on training sessions for educators to learn and share knowledge.
For example, to prepare themselves to teach coding, teachers practise programming a Blue-Bot robot with an iPad app to develop their own skills. “This virtuous loop is a fundamental ingredient for making our school successful,” says Francesca Testa, an Apple Professional Learning Specialist and Apple Distinguished Educator within the faculty who runs regular sessions for her colleagues.
Such a foundation ensures that new teachers have a strong development pathway while tenured faculty continue to grow their teaching practices. As more teachers learn the fundamentals of using iPad, they are empowered to explore other development programmes — like Apple Teacher, where teachers earn rewards as they learn new skills, all at their own pace.
With teachers bringing these fresh ways of learning into the classroom, students are thriving. In music lessons, students gather around a piano to play and write their own music using Apple Pencil with Pages. Others use GarageBand to create and record their own sounds in concert with classmates playing instruments. In coding class, students use CoSpaces Edu on iPad to make 3D creations and Swift Playgrounds to animate in AR and VR environments.
“Today, students are testing 30 per cent higher in coding, compared to the regional average. We couldn’t be more proud of how our teachers are using Apple technology to increase student engagement and achievement.”
