The Beauty and Pleasure of Understanding: Engaging with Contemporary Challenges Through Science Education (Proceedings of ESERA 2019)

As part of the Italian ministerial project “National Scientific Project” (PLS, Piano Lauree Scientifiche), on chemistry’s learning empowering, the University of Camerino has been holding residential training courses addressed to in-service high school science teachers. Meeting the demands for the implementation of digital media in education, a course in blended mode has been run since 2016, offering teachers both face-to-face classes and online activities, hosted on a dedicated e-learning Moodle platform. " The online chemical experiments: instructions for use” course was planned with a bottom-up approach, which included discussions with a group of teachers to reach a common agreement on which key chemistry concepts should be addressed. The first aspect involved refreshing some disciplinary issues as Science teachers are often not graduated in chemistry but other subjects. The second task was the adoption of the extended Johnstone’s model (Mahaffy,2014) for the presentation of chemistry topics, considering that the three levels are normally shown in the curriculum, but its tetrahedral extension to real life cases are often neglected. Then the implementation of multimedia tools followed, thus providing original materials in Italian and English to respond to the demand for CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodology. The analysis of the final questionnaire administered at the end of the course showed the teachers’ positive ratings on the blended training method and the quality and usefulness of digital materials.