New places to learn: the google in classroom support poles of the Open University System in Brazil

Abstract

This article presents the experience of the Polo Universitário Santo Antônio on continuing education of teachers and undergrad students, who employ Google apps towards innovation and inclusion of digital technologies both in classroom and in distance learning. This action justifies itself by satisfying the society needs, where information is, each day, increasingly more present in digital clouds. The demands for learning spaces, transcending the school walls and allowing collaborative learning, are urgent. The training ‘Google for Education’ happened in 2015, in which was applied the action/research methodology, allowing the interaction with students during four months, with activities planned and developed weekly. The theoretical basis included authors, such as Moran (2015) and Behar (2013), among others. We found positive results (in many ways) and evidenced by the creation of online institutional accounts, besides online students’ testimonials, indicating that the vast majority of course participants improved their teaching skills, once they began to use Google applications in the classroom. Another positive result was evidenced with the scholar monitoring, were all the teachers was trained with the Google apps and, today, they choose Classroom as they environmental learning platform with the students, and also as the management tool, through many records that keep all group actualized. Another achieved result was the number of concluded students in 2015, were 90 students fulfilled the course and shared theirs “Classroom” in the Ending Course Seminar. All results together encourage the teachers’ community to seek for improvement, and in the year of 2016, eighty new students have joined the new course edition.