National Association of Secondary School Principals

Abstract Two years after the shock undergone by the Italian school ecosystem—due to the lock-down imposed by the COVID-19 at beginning of March 2020—the effects generated by the resulting fully digital immersion have been investigated by a survey administered to a representative sample of school teachers and principals. The analysis of the outcomes, together with their comparison with similar investigations performed in May 2020 and March 2021, shows that the activities carried out in the last two years—from emergency teaching to integrated teaching and, finally, to teaching in a “new normal” condition—have triggered an apparently fast innovation process with beneficial effects on the e-maturity of the system, on the educational processes and on the state of the individual well-being. Although some symptoms of normalization start to be glimpsed, and despite the workload increase induced by the adoption of technologies, the system seems ready to carry out an optimization of the educational processes to include a stable use of didactic activities augmented by technologies and, more in general, of forms of integrated on-line learning. As a corollary, emerges the relevance attributed, in a plebiscite manner, to continuous training (LLL) on learning technologies and digital pedagogy, as well as the need to implement permanent forms of smart working to thin the organizational processes.KeywordsSmart learning ecosystemsItalian schoolsCOVID-19 pandemicSchool e-maturitySchool teachersSchool principalsTechnology innovation processTechnology-enhanced learningIntegrated learningSmart organizationIndividual well-beingDescriptive analysisCausal network

Foreign language learning offers teachers a great opportunity to help students become aware of different viewpoints; they learn to see the connections and relationships between foreign language Learning and culture learning.