Supporting the 'whole learning design life-cycle' through the pedagogical planner

It is widely claimed that there is an urgent need for finding new methods and tools to support teacher education, so as to effectively foster their professional development and allow innovation to permeate the educational systems. The learning design research field (LD) can contribute to tackling this issue by providing methods and tools to support teachers in the delicate phases of designing and planning innovative educational activities, so as to target e-inclusion (special need students' necessities) through personalized learning actions. The paper illustrates an innovative tool called Pedagogical Planner (PP), which is able to support the three main phases of the learning design cycle, namely Conceptualization, Authoring, and Implementation. The LD tool has been used by teachers to support innovative and personalized educational interventions in the field of intangible cultural heritage education and has proved to present a number of advantages and innovative aspects in respect to other existing tools, which are discussed in the paper. The positive results obtained so far encourage adoption of the tool in teacher training contexts to support teachers in devising and planning innovative educational intervention when ICTs are to be integrated in traditional teaching/learning contexts in an inclusive logic, which also implies setting up personalized learning paths in order to ensure that no student is left behind