“Online teaching gave him and his students more opportunities for autonomy and freedom than face to face lessons”. On the other hand, there are many complaints on online teaching: a chemistry teacher noted, in fact, that “students were disoriented in online learning” and another one reported that “online teaching deprived students from their need to socially communicate and the lack of social interaction had led to a decrease of their learning motivation in front of the screen”. Moreover, if for a physics & maths teacher interviewed in the focus group, online teaching represented a “discovery” in the explanation of the experiments, because it allows him to prepare the guidelines in advance and guide his pupils at a distance in repeating the experiment several times; for another teacher it has been a failure because most of students were just connected online, but not paying attention nor doing the tasks required. Obviously, the world situation found the teachers unprepared and they had to face too many challenges at once: the data of 38.5% of the respondents who considered that they were stressed or overstressed by teaching is relevant and worrying and it is accompanied by another 36.9% who rated their stress level as average. As also confirmed by the teachers involved in the focus group, the most stressful was time management; in fact, the main challenge according to a teacher was facing the short time slot of the online sessions compared to the huge volume of material they need to cover, according to the national curriculum. Another need that emerged from the results regards digital innovation: there is a need for teachers to attend seminars and courses to keep up to date with new technologies, new tools and applications to use in their online lessons. 16
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