The "Flipped classroom" method: a survey of the italian situation

Didactics, including didactics of Mathematics, can not be thought apart from informatics technologies which, nowadays, are a considerable and permeated part of teachers and (especially) students’ lives. Evaluated as tools, these technologies are not good nor bad. Instead they turn out to be more or less helpful depending on how they are used. From a survey on the use of Informatics tools, led between Science high-school Italian teachers, we have registered almost a total agreement on the teaching method known as “flipped classroom”. In such a technique, the teacher provides his/her students materials - like books, slide presentations, web sites, tutorials videos, etc - they need to study the argument on their own. Thus students work alone, or in small groups, at home and then, they can discuss the topic in the classroom with the help of the teacher who is seen as a moderator/motivator. In this paper we present both the results of a study conducted in some selected school where the "flipped classroom" is strongly applied and a survey of documents and online communities used by the interviewed teachers as a support for their experiences in classroom. Keywords: Mathematics didactics, Informatics and Communication Technology, Flipped classroom, Self Regulated Learning, ICT, Inverted Classroom