O laptop educacional na sala de aula : movimentos de letramento digital nas práticas de leitura e escrita de estudantes do ensino fundamental

Abstract

This master’s thesis has as its main goal to investigate how digital literacy movements take place in the reading and writing practices in the context of introducing laptops in an elementary school. The study has Piaget’s genetic epistemology and Soares’ and Levy’s concepts for digital literacy as its theoretical reference. The research has an exploratory approach in which the methodological outline is given by a case study. Research subjects were four 13-year-old students, from the 6th grade at a public elementary school involved in the Projeto UCA (Brazilian program for the One Laptop per Child program), on its second phase. Evidence sources for the corpus were the researcher’s log book, video transcripts, and the writing production by the subjects of the research. Piaget’s clinical method inspired the observations and interventions. Analysis procedures were followed as per Moraes and Galiazzi’s (2007) and their procedures recommended for text discourse analysis. The categories for the analysis were developed from looking at the evidence sources, considering the subjects’ movements and the researcher’s movement as she appropriated the theoretical concepts. Those categories were: a) digital reading and writing; b) digital fluency; and c) searching on the web. From the theoretical elements and our understanding during the process, we present some possible guidelines so that reading and writing processes can contain practices of digital literacy. We understand that introducing the laptop in school has been causing some perturbation, but hasn’t constituted a new teaching and learning context yet; it is still in process. Movements towards digital literacy are sometimes minimized by the teachers, who do not create opportunities or chances for the students to make their own choices and potentialize their practices with this new element in the classroom. Even so, it was possible to notice some signs of students’ practices of digital literacy, such as digital fluency and reading and writing in the digital context.