PRODACT, a tool to analyse digital products created by students, against Digital Educational Poverty

The construct of ‘digital educational poverty’ was introduced in 2021 by CREMIT and Save the Children, expanding on the concept of the ‘digital divide’. The article presents how this framework is the outcome of the hybridisation of two perspectives through which digital competence can be understood: that of ‘rights’ and that of ‘New Literacies’. At the heart of the article is the description of the PRODACT tool (PROmote Digital Analysis and Competences in Transmedia), developed in 2023 by the authors and applied between 2021 and 2024 to products created by 6,598 minors (most of them 12 or 13 years old) within the framework of a project involving 99 secondary schools throughout Italy. PRODACT was designed to support teachers in evaluating the digital artefacts produced by students, emphasising the centrality of practices in a dialectical relationship between theory and application, between consumption and production, and between criticism and creativity. It is structured around five dimensions and eight indicators, which were adapted and refined into seven specific versions tailored to each format type (Wikipedia, online petition, podcast investigation interview, podcast review, visual storytelling, video storytelling, and social marketing). The article analyses 350 products through PRODACT, demonstrating how digital competence must be considered dynamic rather than static (not something obtained ‘once and for all’) and how, in this perspective, PRODACT enables an integrated and comparative evaluation of the richness and complexity of the aspects that define these products, promoting their use in curricular teaching practices.