Since its foundation in in 1925, Indire has been priding itself of a history of documentation in support of innovation. The aim of this line of research is to set out environments and tools to enable mapping innovative teaching in Italy by unveiling places, timings and methods, and making knowledge accumulated in schools transferable.

A further aspect of investigation of this line of research concerns linguistic codes to be used in the documentation process.  Written texts proved often to be ineffective to convey the manyfold variety of the interaction taking place at school. In order to achieve this purpose it is necessary to involve the visual dimension of communication and direct observation of practices.

The main areas of studies of this line are:

• the development of methods for the documentation of didactic activities to be proposed to schools to encourage constant reflection on practices;
• contents production and formalisation of documentation processes that can present innovation experiences at best;
• elaboration of controlled languages;
• the creation of information technology architectures and systems of research for the semantic description of the resources and the processes;
• the development of online environments specifically created for documentation and easy obtainment of information.