Aplicativos educacionais no ensino da matemática: potencialidades de uso em concepções e práticas docentes

Abstract

The technological advance has made possible the dissemination of the use of smartphones around the world among children, young people and adults. At school, this technology is going beyond fun and distraction, because easy access to the internet has been making it possible to search for information in real time. This spread in developed countries has occasioned a growth in the enterprise market of creation of educational applications (software with specific functionalities performed on operational systems created for mobile devices), because when recognizing the potential of these technologies in teaching and learning processes, they started to develop products from a commercial vision with a lucrative intentionality, lacking a re levant pedagogical proposal. Thus, this study had as main objective the investigation of teachers' conceptions about the potentialities of the use of Educational Applications in Mathematics teaching, in an educational context in which the use of these digital mobile technologies is prohibited or restricted to pedagogical use. As a result, the following question guided this study: In teachers' conceptions, in what aspects can the use of Educational Apps contribute to Mathematics teaching in the context of Mo bile Learning? The study has its theoretical support in the field of Mobile Learning in the conceptions of Traxler (2005) and Moura (2010), as well as in the discussions about the use of Apps in education in the studies of Saccol and Schlemmer (2011), Dias and Araújo Jr (2012) and Figueiredo (2005). With a qualitative approach, the research was developed during the mini-course "The use of smartphones in Mathematics teaching", by the extension project Rede Colabora, Universidade Federal de Pelotas, which uses the Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle) to promote courses of teacher education for the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), in Distance Education (EAD). The subjects of the research were 31 Mathematics teachers who work in basic edu cation of public school system in different regions of Brazil. The participants conducted the mini -course, which was organized in four modules, during a five-week period, and I worked there as a teacher. In each module, an activity was proposed with the intention of producing data that could answer the guiding question of the research and reach the proposed objective. The data were produced from interviews with the teachers through online questionnaires, observation of the interactions in the discussion forum, analysis of the contents of the lesson plans and the digital narratives produced by the teachers from a developed teaching practice with the Photomath Application. In the analysis, three categories were considered: The relation of the teachers with the Digital Mobile Technologies; Educational Apps on teacher assessments; and teaching practices with Educational Apps. From the nine potentialities identified by the teachers in the evaluation and in the practice, the results evidenced the contributions of t he use of this educational software in the Mathematics teaching in five aspects: pedagogical, social, behavioral, physical and evaluative.