Educational innovation and technology: A need for integration

This paper aims to discuss why and how teaching practices and technologies need to be integrated, at all levels, to improve learners meaningful learning. A first attempt to define pedagogical innovation is presented, with a reference to Creative Class Room framework (CCR). In the CCR framework, innovation is seen as an intentional activity, occurring in a specific social, economic, technological, organizational and cultural context, designed to address unsolved problems and involving complex interactions between various actors who actively seek to learn from one another. From this point of view, pedagogical innovation, considering technological and digital based learning environment, is a matter of integration among different levels of analysis, from individual to social, and from traditional to most innovative teaching and learning practices. The need for a better understanding of how people learn and how technologies need to be used to enhance this learning is also discussed, with a final part on how creativity and innovation have to face ‘mundane’ educational settings daily issues.