Teaching and learning with Digital Technologies in a state in the Northeast of Brazil: before, during and after the Pandemic

Abstract

Although the incorporation of Digital Technologies in teaching and learning has advanced in recent years, it was due to the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020, that they became the main, if not the only, option for continuing school education, with the closure of schools around the world and the adoption of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). This article intends to report part of a multi-method investigation carried out with 75 managers, 237 teachers and 1,812 students from high schools in Rio Grande do Norte – Brazil – regarding their perceptions about the changes in their school practices regarding the use of Digital Technologies during and after the Pandemic. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected in 2022, via online questionnaires and interviews and analyzed, respectively, through Statistical and Thematic Analysis. According to the results, at the beginning of the pandemic, most school managers, teachers and students felt unprepared to migrate to ERT, due to a lack of training, of access to digital resources, the biggest challenge faced during the period, and of knowledge to handle them. Several technologies were used, with emphasis on smartphones, notebooks, VLE, message groups (instant messaging applications) and web conferencing applications, mainly to communicate, send and receive content. In this sense, students showed lower use than school managers and teachers, due to the lack of access to digital resources. There was an increase in the use of digital resources in school practices during and after the pandemic, as well as continuity in the use of some of the resources added during the pandemic, which points to more collaborative, engaging and interactive teaching and learning practices.