Fabio Martínez, a teacher of Visual and Plastic Education at the Institut Escola Industrial de Sabadell, has promoted the initiative 'aulaia.cat' , an online space that includes educational applications tailored for educational centers. The initiative's aim is to improve aspects that teachers commonly identify and make life at the center easier. Currently, the initiative has resources such as Ràdio Escolar, Aules Sostenibles and Pla Lector.
From the Punt TIC Network, we spent some time with him to learn about the initiative.
1. What is aulaia.cat?
This is an online space that collects educational applications tailored for educational centers. All of them arose from a real classroom situation that could be improved with digital tools. For example, the Reader Plan. We wanted to promote reading and we had the library inventory in a spreadsheet. We turned it into a digital library, where students participate in the roles of librarian, provide reading support and complete their own reading passport. These applications aim to improve aspects that teachers identify in their day-to-day lives.
2. How did the initiative come about?
It is a personal initiative, which has had the support of the management of the Institut Escola Industrial de Sabadell. Here, we have a strong tradition of innovation projects. This allows an idea not to remain in a drawer. The diversity of the classrooms has also influenced it. As a teacher, I often need to prepare adaptations, and the usual format, different material, is difficult to make without being noticed. And when it is noticed, the adaptation stops working. The proposals allow adaptations that the teacher manages privately, without comparisons.
3. What resources can trainers find?
Any center that wants to access it can request a free registration directly on the initiative's website. Currently, they will find Dictates, School Radio, Sustainable Classrooms and Reading Plan . For example, in the case of Sustainable Classrooms, students participate in classroom inspections with an auditable rubric and score, and are responsible for order and recycling instead of receiving the assignment. There are other resources, but they are in the testing phase.
4. And the students?
These are tools designed for them, obviously, although the idea is not for them to spend more time in front of a screen, but for them to participate and for when they use technology to do something together. Ràdio Escolar is the clearest case. Students record podcasts about what interests them, artificial intelligence helps them edit them, cuts out silences, suggests titles, groups chapters, and teachers publish them. In the Reader Plan, students take on real roles, as librarians. The management work that previously fell to the teacher becomes part of the learning process.
5. What role does artificial intelligence play?
A few years ago, a public school that wanted a custom-made tool had to order it and pay for it. Today, it can build it. However, artificial intelligence provides the code, but not the criteria. None of these applications invent anything pedagogically new. They work because there is a teacher behind it who knows what is wrong in the classroom and what should not be touched. Without the human part, it makes no sense. There is a second non-negotiable issue: we work with minors. Therefore, an educational tool that does not take care of their privacy, intimacy and security is useless.
6. What are the next challenges in the educational field?
There will be the challenge of testing, trying, choosing and discriminating. These years we will see many educational initiatives of this type in educational centers, and the school, the institute and the managements will have to know which tools are valid and which are not. In the end, the criterion is simple: that they are truly useful tools in the classroom. If a tool does not improve what happens inside the classroom, it must disappear, even if it has taken months to devise, develop and build.