Embracing new media within the school does not only affect the teacher’s role and the valorization of the student’s potentialities, but it also impacts on how the educative and didactic environments and areas are arranged. The employment of new didactic tools entails a transformation of the didactic setting, both inside the classroom and inside the whole school.

Besides, new media alone do not change the school didactics. They are tools available to teachers, with which it is possible to develop the potentialities of collaboration, teamwork, station activities and thematics, etc.  But they can also be integrated to a traditional didactics, focused on the teacher and on the discipline that needs to be taught. They can also be considered as objects to be studied and mastered in a completely disconnected and parallel way with respect to the didactic curriculum.

The research focuses on the potentialities of digital media to innovate didactics and learning settings. To this end, a thorough survey on the school status quo has been carried out: available equipment, employment, teacher’s expertise. Secondly, the focus has been placed on the needs of teachers, principals and kids with respect to media and spaces to teach and learn. Finally, the opinions of all the polled school actors about the school of the future have been sounded out: how do they imagine it? Do digital media indeed impact on the innovation of spaces and didactics?    

The generative objectives of the survey have been the following: reflecting on how the didactic technologies have been received in the school environment under different perspectives; underlining the innovative potential concealed behind needs and proposals; encouraging all the school actors (principals, teachers, kids and parents) to imagine the school of the future. They lead to a pedagogic vision, useful to teachers and students to elaborate new teaching-learning strategies, and also interesting for architects and employing parties in the processes of changing school areas and/or in view of building new schools. Because it is precisely from dreams that we can start achieving an ideal, that is a new, lively, abreast-of-time school.

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