In Italy, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, all schools were closed on March 5, 2020 and it was mandatory to switch to “distance learning”, in order not to interrupt the teaching continuity and to guarantee the right to education for all students. The Ministry of Education suggested several initiatives to teachers, including the PP&S national project. In the paper we analyse why and how the PP&S project, intended for teachers of secondary schools of the STEM disciplines but opened in the emergency to teachers of all disciplines, was able to provide much needed support and not only. Following this opening and the consequent registration of many new teachers, three different phases were carried out: an analysis phase of the teachers’ needs for online teaching, a phase of support and initial help, and a training phase. The results show an extremely high participation of the teachers and a wide online collaboration. All the teachers of the PP&S will certainly have an advantage in the post-covid teaching, since they can take advantage of the work done and the experience and skills gained in the past.

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the need to promote digital education has been felt even more, bringing the DELTA Research Group to reflect on how digital education could optimally facilitate the creation of an educating community able to promote and support educational success exclusively through distance learning. In order to answer, in this paper the experience of the 2019/2020 edition of “Scuola dei Compiti” (a recovery project for secondary schools of the poorest suburbs of Turin) is analysed in the perspective of the priority strategies illustrated in the Digital Education Action Plan for the period 2021-2027. Results will show that this was a forerunner experience perfectly in line with the principles and directions outlined in the document. Moreover, thanks to digital education, even a peculiar edition of the project such as this one has been a success: in fact, it has allowed students to improve from a cognitive and metacognitive point of view, even during a time that was very difficult for some families.

Numerous studies in Mathematics Education have shown that among the causes of disciplinary learning difficulties are the acquisition and understanding of its specialized language. Data-Driven Learning (DDL) is a didactic approach that treats language as data and sees students as researchers doing guided discovery activities. The exploration of corpora can effectively support reflection on the specialized languages of Mathematics. What data should be used? Students daily use the most recent Large Language Models (LLM) and Google, which can be used for linguistic investigations. However, it must be remembered that there is no total control over the data on which searches are carried out, the results, and the type of language they use. Control over the data is important, especially when teachers want to use these tools to design and deliver didactic activities. This paper presents a recent DDL research activity with 80 secondary school students on the specialized language of Mathematics. The students conducted linguistic investigations on a specially designed corpus and carried out corpus-based activities with automatic formative assessment within a Digital Learning Environment. The results show that the students appreciated the proposed activities. They develop linguistic and mathematical skills and become more aware of the importance of the language they use. Students developed digital skills in browsing, searching, and filtering data, as well as in evaluating data, information, and digital content. LLM, such as ChatGPT, could not be used for the same type of activity, but with appropriate design, they can be used as a starting point for investigation and linguistic reflection. In the future, given the notable diffusion of these AI tools, it is essential to train teachers and students on their strengths and weaknesses and how they influence teaching and learning.