Education digital storytelling (EDS) refers to digital storytelling in education. EDS is often presented as a technology-enhanced learning approach with powerful educational benefits. The use of EDS as a tool to support students to consider and pursue a meaningful life based on their interests, talents, and aspirations is spreading. Due to its nature, EDS could be an optimal tool to create and share digital stories to stimulate career plans. This paper deals with the educational uses of digital storytelling and presents an overview of how EDS can be used to support career guidance. It concludes with a brief description of the NEFELE Erasmus+ project that will implement tangible user interfaces (TUIs) in the classrooms to promote the EDS as a tool for career intervention.

The Baking Tray Task is an ecological task developed for the assessment of unilateral neglect that can also be used for research on neurotypical participants. In this task, participants are asked to place 16 objects inside a board as evenly as possible. In the case of impaired spatial exploration, consequent to right attentional networks damage, asymmetrical object disposition is observed as more objects are placed on the ipsilesional side (typically the right side). The E-BTT is a technology-enhanced version of the Baking Tray Task, implemented with a software platform, E-TAN, which detects the objects and automatically computes their spatial coordinates. This allows a complement to the traditional scoring methods with new measures to extract richer information from the data. In this study, we focus on neurotypical participants to explore if some new indexes, derived from the literature review on similar tasks, can be applied to BTT and E-BTT for research aims. A principal component analysis (PCA) was then performed to verify if these new indexes reflect some common dimensions. Results indicate the emergence of two principal dimensions: spatiality, which summarizes both laterality and verticality, and quality, which regards the explored space and (dis)organization in placing the items.

Information about the paper titled "SOFTWARE-ASSISTED LEARNING IN CHILDREN WITH ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER: A REVIEW" at IATED Digital Library

Background The measures taken to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the lockdown in Italy, do impact psychological health; yet, less is known about their effect on cognitive functioning. The transactional theory of stress predicts reciprocal influences between perceived stress and cognitive performance. However, the effects of a period of stress due to social isolation on spatial cognition and exploration have been little examined. The aim of the present study was to investigate the possible effects and impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on spatial cognition tasks, particularly those concerning spatial exploration, and the physiological leftward bias known as pseudoneglect. A right-hemisphere asymmetry for spatial attention processes crucially contributes to pseudoneglect. Other evidence indicates a predominantly right-hemisphere activity in stressful situations. We also analyzed the effects of lockdown on coping strategies, which typically show an opposite pattern of hemispheric asymmetry, favoring the left hemisphere. If so, then pseudoneglect should increase during the lockdown and be negatively correlated with the efficacy of coping strategies.Methods One week before the start of the lockdown due to Covid-19 in Italy (T1), we had collected data from a battery of behavioral tests including tasks of peri-personal spatial cognition. During the quarantine period, from late April to early May 2020 (T2), we repeated the testing sessions with a subgroup of the same participants (47 right-handed students, mean age = 20, SD = 1.33). At both testing sessions, participants performed digitized neuropsychological tests, including a cancellation task, radial arm maze task and Raven’s advanced progressive matrices. Participants also completed a newly developed COVID-19 Student Stress Scale, based on transactional models of stress, and the COPE-NIV to assess coping orientation. Results The tendency to start cancellation from a left-sided item, to explore first a left-sided arm of the maze, and to choose erroneous response items on the left side of the page on Raven’s matrices, increased from T1 to T2. The degree of pseudoneglect increment positively correlated with perceived stress, and negatively correlated with Positive Attitude and Problem-Solving COPE-NIV subscales. Conclusions Lockdown-related stress may have contributed to increase leftward bias during quarantine through a greater activation of the right hemisphere. On the other hand, pseudoneglect was decreased for better coping participants, perhaps as a consequence of a more balanced hemispheric activity in these individuals.