Media and Information Literacy Among Brazilian K-12 Teachers: A Case Study at Guarujá Municipal Education System

Abstract

The aim of this study was to map the access, use and appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by K-12 teachers in the city of Guarujá, on the coast of the State of São Paulo, Brazil. The investigation was carried out throughout the distance training workshops and distance learning activities offered by the Research Center for New Communications Technologies Applied to Education from the University of São Paulo – School of the Future-USP. An Innovation Ecosystem in Basic Education program was conceived in order to conduct the activities and needed to be adapted to fully digital circumstances due to the global COVID-19 emergency in 2020 and 2021. This change ended up allowing the collection of important information about teachers' perceptions of their digital competences. Among the results pointed out, activities started to be carried out digitally, including by non-conventional means, such as through social networks and also mediated by cell phones; the mandatory experience with the digital environment made the teachers understand that it will not be possible to return to a relationship of certain distance with the computational resources. This scenario makes recurrent difficulties even more serious, such as lack of technical support and maintenance, low Internet connection speed and pedagogical support for creating class content with computers.