The VISIR+ project was an international collaboration project for the dissemination of the remote laboratory VISIR, a tool to support teaching the theory and practice of electrical and electronic circuits. The initiative was first disseminated in Europe, and Latin American countries such as Brazil followed. This chapter essentially aims to discuss the experience of the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil with the VISIR+ project. Various approaches were used for the dissemination of the initiative, including free courses for high school students, teacher training, and the creation of a virtual environment to discuss and share lesson plans that used the remote laboratory VISIR on their plots. In conclusion, the experience was observed as excellent for the institution and there was no reason to put the project ideas aside. After participating in the project, it becomes a challenge to ensure its sustainability.
TopUse Of Emerging Technologies In Education
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are increasingly integrated into society's daily life. Today, it is hard to imagine how society would function without tools and features such as smartphones, tablets, desktops, laptops, among many others.
These resources act as facilitators of daily tasks, being teaching-learning just one of several areas that can be covered by the use of digital technologies.
Howard and Thompson (2015) define technology as all kinds of ICT capabilities in laptops, educational games or smartphones. These resources, which are increasingly present in the various actions taken in our daily lives, from access to news or communication with another person over a long distance.
From the integration of technology in the most varied areas, the incentive to integrate it also into education is understandable, since technology allows students to have control of their own learning (Montrieux et al, 2013).
In Brazil, the interest in including ICT tools in education arose in the 1960s from the Special Secretariat of Informatics, controlled by colonels linked to the National Information Service, whose function was to foster technological development in governmental sectors related to informatics and analyze and decide on projects to be developed related to computer goods (Brazil, 2017).
Later, other actions were developed, such as the National Program for Informatics in Education (PROINFO), in force between 1997 and 2006 (Silva et al, 2017).
The objective of this program was to promote the educational use of informatics in public elementary schools, bringing computers and educational resources to several Brazilian municipalities, where the municipal government would be responsible for providing the necessary physical structure and teacher education. According to data from the Ministry of Education of the Federal Government, the PROINFO program totaled 147,355 microcomputers acquired and 5,564 served over the 9 years of validity (Brazil, 2006).