Gilberto Lacerda Santos

A internet na escola fundamental: sondagem de modos de uso por professores

The purpose of this investigation is to clarify the modes of use of the Internet in basic education settings at state and private schools of the Federal District. The research made a qualitative reading of the quantitative data obtained from questionnaires, interviews and direct observations. Twenty teachers were studied to reveal the way in which the contents made available through the Internet are being apprehended and used in the classroom, the kind of navigation of hypertexts that are being suggested to students, and a typology of the modalities of use of the Internet in education. Data indicate that there are four modes of navigation: random and linear; oriented and problematized; via the pedagogy of projects; through the hypertext creation approach. Data also point out that teachers are able to move forward to a more interesting use of the Internet as a means of teaching and learning, and that the school - with its rhythm and rites - constitutes a significant hindrance. Surely, there is widespread call for change. If students feel unease about the form and hermetic way in which educational practices have been conducted, which in actuality reveals itself as a systematic lack of interest in school, the same seems to happen to teachers, above all when they are asked by managers, parents, students and education theorists to adopt teaching attitudes they have not been prepared for.

Mobile Learning: An Ergonomic Alternative for Long-Awaited Educational Changes?

Mobile learning, until now, was often defined and presented as a learning that could occur anytime and anywhere. However, now we clearly need to go over this definition if we want to take pedagogical benefits from this new learning method. In this paper, we present results of documentary research which demonstrates that the novelty of mobile learning does not consist in a new educational theory, but more in the possibility of new educational practices. Thus, we propose a contextual and technology-oriented framework that takes account of the user’s experiences and interactions in and with the environment of his networked mobility. The affordances of the handheld devices, and more specifically smartphones, seem to have an important role to play in this context, to turn appropriate places and moments of everyday life into learning opportunities, through which the mobile user become a learner.

Contratos e destratos entre Informática e Educação Matemática

Discutem-se as aplicacoes pedagogicas do computador no ensino de geometria por meio de um software de representacoes dinâmicas. Trata-se do relato de uma investigacao voltada para fazer emergir contratos e destratos entre informatica e educacao matematica, por meio de observacoes e entrevistas realizadas com alunos e uma professora em uma escola de Educacao Fundamental na cidade de Brasilia, DF, Brasil. Os resultados da investigacao indicam diferentes possibilidades de trabalho pedagogico na area, suscetiveis de fazerem com que os contratos sobrepujem os destratos.

Transposição midiática: da sala de aula convencional para a presencial conectada

The focus of this article is to introduce the Mediatic Transposition concept referring to the results of a Brazilian research project that sought to identify impacts of Internet videoconferencing (web conferencing) use in education with an emphasis on the changing role of teachers brought on by this new technology. The ethnographic study identified how the teaching tasks changed when pupils and instructors interacted face to face, mediated by technology, using a synchronous communication tool in a hybrid mode of education. This new educational environment in cyberspace is the face-connected classroom. The research took as its starting point studies related to the Didactic Transposition (Chevallard, 1985) and the research addressed changes in teaching practices that were identified and analyzed, specifically those that impacted on the role of instructors during the transition from conventional to face-connected classrooms characterizing Mediatic Transposition.

Ensinar e aprender no meio virtual: rompendo paradigmas

This text describes the results of a synthesis study developed during the period between 2004 and 2008, based on 13 academic and professional Master dissertations, with the objective of discussing the virtual classroom. More precisely, the text aims at outlining the paradigm crisis around the rupture between the presence classroom and the virtual classroom, in view of the emergence of the information society, through empirical data gathered by the 13 Master students that took part in this longitudinal study sponsored by CNPq, FAPDF, and FENADESP. In its first part, there is a general introduction to the theme and to the research problem that gave origin to the meta-analytic or synthesis study described here, which is defined by four questions: 1) what are the new formats for the virtual classroom?; 2) what pedagogical strategies are more adequate to guide the teaching work in the virtual classroom?; 3) what innovative didactic materials are consistent with the teaching work in the virtual classroom?; 4) what new teacher roles emerge in the context of the virtual classroom? There follows a succinct description of the methodological approach adopted to give support to our investigation effort in search of answers to the questions posed above. The third part of the article consists of an equally brief theoretical picture of the concept of virtual classroom. The next section brings a discussion of each of those issues in the light of the results achieved in the 13 Master dissertations analyzed. Lastly, conclusions are put forward, which point out and discuss some of the defining elements of the virtual classroom that give shape to the paradigm crisis alluded to here.

Constructing a Usability Guidelines List for Educational Social Networks

Social Networks are playing an important role in Education. However, many existing ones lack on ergonomics, which directly affects their potential as learning platforms. For this reason, pedagogical usability is of central importance during the development, as well as in the process of maintenance of educational social applications. As a consequence of incomplete and uneasy to use checklists for similar applications, as well as the nonexistence of usability guidelines for social networks as educational environments, this paper presents the first steps of a new usability guideline list. Feedback from the validation show that our guidelines are perceived as well constructed by experts.

GGbook: Uma plataforma educativa que integra múltiplas representações para o ensino de Matemática.

Neste artigo, apresentamos alguns resultados de uma pesquisa que teve como um dos objetivos o desenvolvimento de uma plataforma que integra editores de texto e equacoes com o software educativo GeoGebra, a qual denominamos GGBOOK. Para o desenvolvimento do GGBOOK, usamos a metodologia da Prototipacao que norteou os trabalhos de uma equipe composta por pesquisadores, professores de Matematica e programadores. Os resultados mostraram que a plataforma GGBOOK ampliou as possibilidades do GoeGebra, sobretudo no que diz respeito ao editor de equacoes que e mais intuitivo que editor LaTeX, usado no GeoGebra. Com isso, contribuiu para a producao e a integracao das representacoes de forma a facilitar o trabalho do estudante e do professor na analise/interpretacao daquilo que o estudante fez. Ou seja, o GGBOOK permite que se possam desenvolver compreensoes a respeito de objetos matematicos e comunica-los, ao mesmo tempo em que auxilia tambem numa interpretacao mais facil e factivel das compreensoes ou incompreensoes dos estudantes por meio de suas representacoes.