Abstract
In the last decades the development of virtual tools for teaching science in school has
increased really fast. In spite of the availability of on-line material, the largest part of the
web production is in English and this discourages the regular use by Italian teachers. The
project, of which this paper represents the first part, aims at making available to the
teachers virtual lessons that are a “repository” for the most interesting and useful Earth
science existing tools. The selected material will be adapted to the Italian school system,
with the aim to provide an effective support to the teachers without a geological
background.
The purpose of this work is: 1) to evaluate Earth science teachers’ attitude towards the
digital tools, 2) to understand the need of an updated web tool for science teachers in
Italian, 3) to select the main themes it should contain, 4) to build it, 5) to test the material
produced on in-service teachers. To determine how to proceed a questionnaire was sent to
a selected sample of teachers. By the analysis of the data, the first themes to work on
were selected and a pilot session has been developed, in order to test its effectiveness.