Learning for All (L4A) is a FIRB 2007 project founded by MIUR
Politecnico di Milano, HOC-LABORATORY- DEI: scientific supervisor : Prof. Paolo Paolini

L4A combines Innovative Educational Paradigms and Technologies in order to improve the effectiveness of the Italian Schools, specifically for pupils with special needs.
The Italian School system faces, beside traditional problems, new challenges:
• Difficulty into adopting “on the field” innovative educational paradigms.
• Difficulty into actually adopting the possibilities offered by ICT.
• Difficulty into taking into proper consideration the “special needs” of pupils coming to school from different countries, different cultural (educational background), different segments of societies, different individual abilities and learning styles, etc.

A short list of modern pedagogical paradigms, to be considered, can include Constructivism (where knowledge is regarded as socially constructed by learners), Social constructivism (where learners build their own understanding through social negotiation), Active Learning (where students should be the protagonists of their learning), Constructionism (where learners construct external representations of their own knowledge), Collaborative learning (where learners students tend to help and tutor each other), Problem solving (where learners are presented with a problem, and learn in the process of trying to solve it), Situated learning and anchored instruction (where the problem is relevant to the learners, and anchored in a context that is meaningful to them), Critical thinking (where learners should be presented with multiple perspectives about an issue) , Communities of practice (where learners develop a common corpus of practical knowledge being generated by the learners themselves), Multiple intelligences (where the different types of intelligence are taking into account), Learning styles (where different learning styles are taken into account), etc. etc.

As variety of technologies can be used to support learning processes: e.g. Multimedia Technologies, Immersive 3D environments, Web Technologies, Mobile devices, Collaborative Technologies, social and community environments (web 2.0), Podacasting, Wiki’s, Forums, Games, etc.

The possibilities offered by modern pedagogical paradigms and modern technologies, however, are not yet adopted, not even on experimental scale, by the Italian School System:
• Assuming that teachers are well aware of the different pedagogical approaches and paradigms, they are not able to properly put them at work, especially for facing specific needs of specific groups of pupils.
• Assuming that teachers are properly trained into using technologies (a difficult thing on its own), they are in general not able to decide how and when to use a technology, and even less when and how to use it for facing special needs.
• Combining the triple is in general beyond the reach of an average teacher.

L4A provides a substantial contribution with the following results:
• A set of scientific “hypotheses” about how modern pedagogical paradigms can help coping with special needs. Each pair will be a scientific hypothesis of solution for a specific problem.
• A set of scientific “hypotheses” about how innovative pedagogical paradigms can be supported by technologies.
• The proposal of a number of “solutions” i.e. triples .
• The development of a scientifically grounded methodology for monitoring experimentation of the solutions.
• A large number of experimentations (at least 3,000 pupils), implemented all over Italy (at least 6 regions), putting the proposed solutions on the field, in real-life situations.
• A data base, made public, of data from experimentations and their scientific analysis.
• A set of guidelines for “best practices”.
• A strong communication, in Italy and world wide, toward scientific communities (in pedagogy and technology) and toward practitioners (educational authorities and teachers.