Portale Scuola in Ospedale: A web portal and blog for schools in the hospitals and home tuition

Description: The Italian Portal for School in the Hospital (PSO, Portale Scuola in Ospedale) is a website provided by the Ministry of Education (MIUR).It provides all the basic information needed for those involved in home and hospital education (HHE) in Italy, from teachers to parents.It is also the laboratory for innovation in didactics and organisation, and the repository for experiences in the field of Hospital schools and home learning in Italy.

Notes: The Italian Portal for School in the Hospital (PSO, Portale Scuola in Ospedale) is a website provided by the Ministry of Education (MIUR). It hosts information on good practices all around the country and over through a blog and provides all the basic information needed by the stakeholders involved in HHE in Italy, from teachers to parents. The website includes a database of all the hospital schools in Italy, the hospital sections and the people responsible for them region per region. Another function is to gather all the data (financial and quantitative) on the home tuition projects, the fluxes of children with medical needs and the training courses for teacher year per year. This information is used by the Ministry for making decisions on funding for regions and will soon be opened to the final users in the open data philosophy. The website hosts a forum that is the place for the HHE teachers online community in Italy. It also has a space for parents. Parents and teacher can also find the basic information on laws and regulations on home tuition and get in touch with each other. It finally provides the official announcements from the Ministry to the schools and users in general. Obviously the blog of good practices (hosted on the homepage) may provide many ideas to HHE teachers about the integration of innovative practices into didactics. It is maybe costly to build up such a portal, but an official institutional blog to spread good practices may be quite easy to be built. The PSO will soon host a training area (AFSO) where open courses will be offered to teachers operating in HHE.