ForewordThe deployment of digital technology in the education system is subject to both expectations and "contradictory injunctions ". At a time when generative intelligences are finding their way into educational practices, alerts and warnings are multiplying, calling for a "reasoned use " of screens and technologies in schools.In July 2023, in a report entitled "Technologies in education: who's in charge? ", UNESCO called for "the judicious use of technologies in education (...). We must teach children to live both with and without technology; to pick what they need from the mass of information available, but leave aside what is not necessary; to allow technology to provide support, without ever supplanting human interaction in teaching and learning".Based on data from the latest PISA survey, the OECD in 2024 called for a " fight against distraction" caused by exposure to screens at school. Excessive use of digital devices for leisure purposes in the classroom can have a negative impact on students' academic performance".In April 2024, the commission of experts commissioned by the President of the Republic to assess the issues attached to children's exposure to screens, recommended, among other things, strengthening the application of the ban on phones in middle school and systematizing smartphone-free spaces in high school.The Ministry of Education's September 2024 back-to-school circular bears witness to these debates and warnings, with the experimentation of a "digital break" in middle schools, " so that the ban on cell phone use provided for by law is effective and total over the entire school day".While it emphasizes "the reasoned use of screens and the appropriation of a responsible digital culture", this circular also lays the foundations of a doctrine for "the reasoned use of the possibilities offered by tools using artificial intelligence".In 2023, a study by the Direction de l'Evaluation, de la Prospective et de la Performance (DEPP) reopens the debate on the link between digital technology and educational inequality. For the first time, the DEPP is measuring students' mastery of digital skills at the end of secondary school. Nearly two out of three pupils (63.5%) have a satisfactory command of digital skills, but this assessment highlights significant differences according to social profile. Students from the least-favored middle schools score lower than those from the most-favored middle schools. In an article entitled " Être élève, être enseignant à l'ère numérique : entre avancées égalitaires et inégalités nouvelles" (Being a student, being a teacher in the digital age: between egalitarian advances and new inequalities), three researchers question, after many others, the role of digital technology in "creating inequalities in success and differences in career paths ".
" Reasoned use of screens" and " digital break" at secondary schoolThe notion of thereasoned use of screens and technologies in schools has gradually become an integral part of the Ministry of Education's policy documents.In its Avis sur la contribution du numérique à la transmission des savoirs et à l'amélioration des pratiques pédagogiques (Opinion on the contribution of digital technology to the transmission of knowledge and the improvement of teaching practices), the Conseil supérieur des programmes (High Council for Programs), in 2022, called for "a critical and reasoned use of these means of access to information and communication (...) The aim is to inculcate the principles of a reasoned practice of information and communication tools".In January 2023, the Digital Strategy for Education 2023-2027 characterized the digital offering for the educational community as needing to be " reasoned, sustainable and inclusive".In December 2023, the Choc des savoirs presentation file reminded us that " digital technologies should be used in a reasoned way, with appropriate support".The Circulaire de rentrée 2024, for its part, stresses that " Schools must play a decisive role in the reasoned use of screens and the appropriation of a responsible digital culture. (...) This reliance on digital technology must be correlated with sensible use of screens".This recurring notion ofrational use refers to two issues, two "public problems", which are distinct but often intertwined in public debate:The long-standing issue of overexposure of children and young people to screens;The disruptive effects of telephones at school.In October 2023, the "education and digital" information mission led by the French National Assembly's Delegation for Children's Rights drew a harsh conclusion: "Digital education has not produced the expected results, and awareness of the risks to children in the digital space has made it clear that we need to educate children in digital terms before educating them with digital tools. The beginnings of digital education have thus seen the light of day, but it remains insufficient and needs to be translated into specific, systematic teaching of digital issues in the best interests of the child".Commission of experts on "children and screens" calls for " a coherent, controlled and evaluated strategy on the place of digital technology in schools".In its conclusions submitted on April 30, 2024, the commission commissioned by the President of the Republic to assess the impact of young people's exposure to screens deplores the fact that digital resources in schools "are still too frequently deployed without any structured dialogue with the educational world, without systematic training for teachers and parents, and without any exchange with pupils' parents".While "health and environmental issues plead in favor of limiting the use of screens (particularly individual screens) in schools, as well as limiting the use of screens in the home... The Commission did not reach a general consensus on the ideal level of mobilization of digital tools in terms of equipment and pedagogical uses".However, the ten members of the commission were able to agree on the need for greater consistency in digital matters: progressive exposure to screens for children and teenagers, "no screens in nursery school", "no individual equipment entrusted to children in elementary school", "no digital workspaces for pupils in elementary school".They also advocate the labeling of digital tools whose positive impact has been scientifically validated. " No large-scale deployment should take place without a systematic evaluation or impact study", and call for stricter supervision of the use of digital workspaces and the school life software Pronote, in the interests of protecting teenagers. Updates and notifications for students could be cut off between 7 p.m. and 7.30 a.m., for example.OECD: " The use of digital devices in the classroom has become a double-edged sword ".In 2024, the OECD published a report that examines the links between screens, academic performance and student well-being. It is based on data from the 2022 edition of PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, and on questionnaires sent to 15-year-olds who have taken these tests.The survey revealed that 65% of OECD students reported being distracted by the use of digital devices during at least some mathematics lessons (59% in France). 59% of OECD students said they had been distracted by other students using phones, tablets or laptops during at least some math lessons."The use of digital devices in the classroom has become a double-edged sword. While these devices can broaden access to learning resources , "the temptation to wander off, to focus attention on non-academic activities or to explore the wealth of information their devices make available, can impact student concentration and achievement".The survey also raises questions about students' well-being. In France, for example, 43% of students say they feel nervous or anxious if they don't have their phone near them: a proportion comparable to the OECD average.The OECD concludes by questioning the effectiveness of provisions aimed at regulating the use of digital devices in educational establishments. "This kind of decision can be effective, although this depends to a large extent on how rigorously the ban is enforced. Even in schools where phones have been banned, 29% of students in OECD countries report using one several times a day on average, and 21% every day or almost every day.Back to school in 2024: experimenting with the digital break in secondary schoolsThe back-to-school circular for 2024 announces that a "digital break" will be tried out in volunteer middle schools in each département, so that the ban on cell phone use provided for by law is effective and total over the entire school day, including interstitial high-risk areas such as class changes, recess and the lunch break.This experiment has two objectives:improving the school climate, which can be adversely affected by the use of cell phones, making it possible for violence to develop (online harassment, dissemination of violent images);improved student performance, with phone use having a decisive effect on concentration in class and knowledge acquisition.At the start of the 2024 school year, 199 middle schools have volunteered to implement the system this school year, involving over 50,000 students. Full implementation is scheduled for January 1, 2025."Students don't spend eight hours a day in front of a computer or tablet in class...""The idea that schools are overrun with screens is false. Pupils don't spend eight hours a day in front of a computer or tablet in class", argues Audran Le Baron, Director of Digital Education at the French Ministry of Education, in Le Monde ." France is not Sweden", he assures us, referring to the policy of this Scandinavian country which, after having massively equipped its pupils with tablets, is now going backwards, judging screens to be responsible for the drop in academic standards. "The most common everyday reality is an interactive digital board on which educational resources are projected. By no means all pupils in France have an individual screen in the classroom".According to the Ministry of Education's statistics department, public elementary school will have four fixed computers for every 100 pupils, and nine mobile terminals by 2022; in public middle schools and high schools, these figures will reach an average of 33 fixed terminals for every 100 pupils, and 20 mobile terminals. As this equipment is the responsibility of local authorities, there are major disparities between regions: one elementary school may have difficulty in having a computer room worthy of the name, while in other communes, all pupils are equipped with a tablet that they can take home.
National education and artificial intelligenceThe irruption of Gpt3 chat at the end of 2022 has sparked numerous initiatives in the world of education. Reservations and concerns too: will AI further reinforce inequalities? Will it widen the gap between good and bad students? Change the way they work? Make homework pointless? What can replace the time saved by AI? What about assessment and curricula?In July 2023, a senator's written question led the French Ministry of Education to clarify its position on generative AI: pedagogical interest, use by students, teacher training.In April 2023, following on from the work of the OECD and Unesco, the Ministry's Digital Education Department published an overview of the contributions made by research into artificial intelligence (AI) and education: areas of application, avenues for training and teaching, and prospects with the current trend towards generative AI and large-scale language models.For its part, Canopé, the operator of in-service teacher training, offered its first training days in 2023 on the theme "AIs, what assistance for pedagogues and pedagogy?"AI and "Knowledge ClashThe digital component of "Clash of Knowledge announced by Gabriel Attal, then Minister of Education, in December 2023, expressed strong expectations and hopes for AI: "Today, artificial intelligence tools can maintain a dialogue with students and enable them to progress orally thanks to voice recognition, but also offer them grammar, syntax or translation exercises adapted to their level. These tools can also be used to individualize progress in French or mathematics, with a method based on the playful repetition of exercises to master the fundamentals of grammar, conjugation, writing, arithmetic, geometry or logic. Based on the teachings of cognitive science, they offer students a flexibility of use that makes them all the more attractive, and complementary to the teacher's teaching ".While reminding us that "these technologies must be used in a reasoned manner and with appropriate support", the Minister announced that "France will be the first country in the world to make the use of an artificial intelligence application ( MIA) available free of charge to all pupils in a given age group to support their academic progress. It will be used outside class hours, and in addition to in-class support, to go deeper into fundamental concepts, in line with the national 2nd grade assessments "." Develop students' critical thinking about how AIs work and how they are used".The September 2024 back-to-school circular expresses a more measured posture towards AI, formulated in terms of challenges:"Create the conditions for collective appropriation of AI and its challenges, so as to define together the conditions in which it can be integrated into everyday classroom life.Encourage the reasoned use of AI from 5th grade onwards, under teacher supervision and in line with the development of curricula.Enable schools to play their part in media education and understanding the advantages and disadvantages of technology".While " every teacher can explore the uses of AI", the circular reminds us that, "in the interests of vigilance and reflexivity, a form of regular, methodical and deliberative questioning should be organized to develop students' critical thinking about how AI works and how it is used".Creating an AI cultureIn this circular, Education Minister Nicole Belloubet announces the forthcoming development of a national education strategy on artificial intelligence. In March 2023, she had asked the Conseil Supérieur des Programmes to take into account the contribution of artificial intelligence: " The programs will contribute, for each discipline, to creating a AI cultureculture, in particular through the reasoned use of the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence tools. For each year, they will identify the use cases where the contribution of AI represents a real added value, and the concepts that need to be understood".Within the DNE (Direction du numérique pour l'éducation), a Communauté de Réflexion en Éducation sur l'Intelligence Artificielle (CREIA) " aims to put innovation and artificial intelligence (AI) at the heart of pedagogical practices and educational thinking".The General Inspectorate for Education, Sport and Research (IGESR) plans to submit a report in February 2025 on "the use of artificial intelligence in schools, from an administrative and pedagogical point of view".As two computer science professors, Jean Ponce and Isabelle Ryl, observe in Le Monde, the attention generated by AI " is reminiscent of the media hype that greeted the arrival of MOOCs (for Massive Open Online Course) in 2012. These online courses were supposed to revolutionize higher education by enabling anyone to follow courses taught by the best - often American - professors from a distance, sometimes free of charge. Despite an upturn during the Covid-19 pandemic, the impact of MOOCs has proved relatively modest, and they are now just another educational tool, for example in the training of professionals.
Digital skills among secondary school students: significant differences according to social backgroundIn May 2022, the Direction de l'Evaluation, de la Prospective et de la Performance (DEPP) measured students' mastery of digital skills at the end of secondary school for the first time.The new assessment distinguishes between different levels of performance. It is based on the Digital Competency Reference Framework (DCRF), with five domains (information and data, communication and collaboration, content creation, protection and security, digital environment) and sixteen competencies. This is in line with the European DIGCOMP reference framework.Nearly two out of three students (63.5%) have a satisfactory command of digital skills, enabling them to use digital tools in a reasoned, secure and eco-responsible way. In particular, they demonstrate know-how in using the advanced functions of various communication, word processing, image processing and presentation software programs.Among them, 10% are particularly at ease: they know how to process data using a spreadsheet-graph, are familiar with best practices for solving digital-related problems, and have a global vision of the impact of digital technology on society and the adaptations needed to minimize it.In contrast, 15% of students have only a limited grasp of these skills. For example, when communicating by e-mail, these students know how to identify the sender and how to behave respectfully, but they haven't mastered the conventions of e-mail writing, and they don't know how to guard against fraudulent e-mails.Read more : Digital skills among secondary school pupils: significant differences according to social background
Educational inequalities: what role does digital technology play in creating inequalities in success, and how can they be reduced?"Stories about the 'end of school' have been multiplying over the past decade or so, with the idea of a digital turnaround calling for a reinvention of education (...) At the heart of the work, educational inequalities can be defined here (...) as differences in access deemed by society to be unjustified, condemnable, to educational goods. The aim is to understand the role of digital technology in creating inequalities in success and differences in career paths.The issue of educational digital inequalities is at the heart of the latest issue of Revue en Education (REE). The articles in this issue take complementary approaches, combining the experience of teachers with that of students and their parents. The authors draw in particular on the work of the e-FRAN IDÉE research program (Digital Interactions for Education and Teaching), which considers the transformation of educational digital uses, particularly in schools, from the perspective of reducing inequalities.Agnès Grimault-Leprince, Sophie Joffredo-Le Brun and Pascal Plantard, coordinators of this issue of REE, set out in their introduction to identify " areas for the development of digital pedagogical and training practices that can help reduce educational inequalities ". The dossier explores three notions that are " central to the understanding of socionumeric issues in education": technology appropriation, cooperation and empowerment.Read more : Educational inequalities: what role does digital technology play in creating inequalities in success and how can they be reduced?
The "Numerics and Computer Science" specialization in the first and last years of secondary school suffers from a lack of appeal.In 2019, the reform of the baccalauréat has introduced a new specialization: "Numérique et Sciences Informatiques" (NSI), one of the 19 specializations offered in première and terminale.The NSI specialization (four hours per week in Première and six hours in Terminale) has succeeded the previous Computer Science and Digital Science specialization (two hours per week) introduced in 2012, which was only offered to Terminale S students. Today, this course is taught by teachers holding the CAPES NSI or the inter-university diploma "Enseigner l'informatique au lycée" ("Teaching computer science in high schools"), which will be introduced in 2019.At the start of the 2023 school year, 38,091 first-year students chose the "digital and computer sciences" course, representing 10.1% of all students (compared with 34,721 in 2020, representing 9%). NSI ranks 8th among the most popular courses chosen in Première. At the start of the 2023 school year, 17,612 students took the NSI specialization in their final year: 4.3% of all students (13,884 in 2020, 3.7%).Read more : The "Numerics and Computer Science" specialization in the first and last years of secondary school suffers from a lack of appeal
A Forge for educational digital commonsThe Ministry's digital strategy for education devoted a chapter to "digital commons": " a set of digital resources produced and managed by a community. By their very nature, they are shared and collective ". In addition to a number of tools already available to teachers, such as the apps education.fr service platform (which provides collaboration and communication tools), the Éléa platform (which enables teachers to create and share open educational resources) and the "Magistère" platform (which provides teachers and all Ministry staff with an extensive catalog of resources for online training), the strategy announced the forthcoming availability of a "forge" that would enable teachers " to collaborate between peers and share computer code ".This forge, which is now operational, brings together both teacher-developers who upload their project code (such as PrimTux, MathALÉA, e-comBox or La Nuit du Code) and teachers who choose text or formatted text (Markdown, LaTeX, etc.) to edit and publish educational content".For this mathematics teacher of 36 years, "the in-depth work on educational digital commons " undertaken by the French Ministry of Education since 2020 is "one of the best ideas since computers first entered the school system. Communications from the administration on this subject do exist, but remain too confidential for my taste, or are disseminated in a very targeted way". After a brief description, he details a number of examples of use, most of them personal, which illustrate the (already current) contribution of existing educational digital commons to teaching, before proposing "historical and sociological landmarks to better understand the notion of digital commons".
New research themes in digital educationThe French Ministry of Education's Digital Education Department has set up a research program to assess the impact of digital practices on teaching and learning, and to strengthen support for them. This program is organized around digital theme groups (GTNum), led by university laboratories or other public operators whose missions include research and/or scientific monitoring and mediation.The aim of these working groups (GTNum) is to produce knowledge and identify elements of strategic orientation and levers for action to support digital practices in the academy, and to propose forward-looking scenarios and concrete actions to support the digital transformation of education, based on research findings;For the period 2024-2027, the Digital Department plans to create new digital theme groups around the following topics:Critical thinking, IME and digital (contributions and risks associated with generative AI (text, photos, videos, voice,...), attention grabbing, literacy of data, algorithms and AI.Generative AI, pedagogical engineering and management: ethical and legal issues, evolution of technologies and practices, assistance for teachers, trainers and supervisory staff.Generative AI, creative activities and practices: ethical and legal issues, intellectual, cultural and artistic practices.Evaluating and supporting AI appropriation processes in a pedagogical system: sharing practices and training methods, scientific, pedagogical and didactic issues across disciplines.E-sport workshops in secondary schools.Digital technology and mathematics teaching and learning (core subjects in CP and CE1, fractions and decimal numbers in 6e-5e): didactic developments, production and sharing of resources, student assessment.Certification, micro-certification: international overview, school and university practices, prospects.Education and training for digital citizenship: issues, practices, digital transition and ecological transition.Cybersecurity and education: awareness and acculturation of staff and learners, governance, training methods, challenges and risk management.GTnum publications are available online in the Hypotheses "Education, digital and research" notebook.PISA 2025 to focus on learning in the digital worldThe PISA 2025 "Learning in the Digital World" assessment will focus on two essential skills for learning with technology:self-regulated learning, which refers to the monitoring and control of metacognitive, cognitive, behavioural, motivational and affective processes during learning;Computing and scientific research practices, which refer to the ability to use digital tools to explore systems, represent ideas and solve problems using computational logic.The results should be available in December 2027.
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