Digital culture is key to engaging students in the learning process
Institutions need to integrate platforms into school life and offer training to teachers; students gain in diversity of content and views that dialogue with their reality
Inserting digital culture in schools is one of the biggest challenges in education today. The use of cell phones, tablets, computers and educational platforms as a pedagogical resource to favor the teaching and learning process is still a distant reality for most Brazilian schools. “The time at school, the logic of the class, the training and didactics of the teacher, the content of the book, none of this talks to the student's life, very permeated by the digital world. This is the biggest gap that exists today between students and schools ”, says Renato Dias, director of innovation and product at Camino Education.
He points out that children and teenagers write in digital media from an early age, interact with Google, YouTube and other platforms and have access to a variety and multiplicity of content and media, while their experience at school is limited to books. “The knowledge is contained in that set of pages, which has a production cycle that takes three years to be ready. This means that the student is reading today what was written three years ago. During this period, the world is different. ”
According to Dias, for digital culture to be developed and fostered, the first step is for managers, teachers and the school community as a whole to decide to bring this to the institution. It also depends on training and advice to teachers, not only in the technical sense of how to operate a platform, for example, but also to understand what that proposal is. In addition, it is necessary for it to actually integrate into the school's daily life, in addition to modernizing its technological infrastructure.
The digital in the curriculum
“A decision we made when we developed Cloe, Camino's digital learning platform, is that it was not a pendant, but acted at the heart of the school's experience, which is the curriculum. It is necessary to create customs and practices that bring platforms and connectivity to everyday life ”, says the director. In addition to content, Cloe allows students to carry out assessments and monitor their results and progress in the learning process. Teachers also have access to courses and training.
For Dias, the proximity that the student has with the digital medium – on the cell phone, on the computer at home, on the tablet, on Whatsapp, on Instagram – brings a world of possibilities for the teacher. For example, the history teacher can teach with a meme. In Geography class, instead of being restricted to a single photo of a landscape, he can show a thousand images on Instagram. Another opportunity that digital brings are different views on the same theme, while in the textbook there is only one voice, that of the author of that work.
“The digital world brings this multiplicity and diversity of content and perspectives, in a much more aligned way with the student's reality. It is a vast repertoire for the teacher to work with the student and also for him to graduate and learn ”, completes the director.
