New Technologies and Education: Learning with TICs in Mexican Public Schools

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This paper introduces and evaluates a recent program established in Mexican public schools called Enciclomedia which consists of a platform containing free textbooks for elementary school in a digital format and allows users to create hyperlinks between the content of the lessons and the archives elaborated by the Public Education Office (SEP). The objective of this project is to contribute to the improvement of the quality in the education provided in the country’s public elementary schools as well as to create an impact in the educational and learning processes through experimentation and interaction with the educational contents that constitute Enciclomedia, turning it into an aid for the teaching practice which in turn stimulates new pedagogical practices within the classroom to approach the topics and contents of textbooks. A little over three years after having established Enciclomedia the media in general has shown to be critical and skeptical to the virtues of a project that attempted to make use of state-of-the-art tools in public classrooms but that faced the logical difficulties of an educational system with cumulative deficiencies as well as digital and generational gaps between teachers and learners. The author of this paper did her own analysis of the project through documentary and field research.

Stream: Curriculum and Pedagogy; Student Learning, Learner Experiences, Learner Diversity

Paper: , New Technologies and Education

Sociologist, born in Mexico City. Candidate to a Ph.D. degree in Sociology for El Colegio de Mexico and recently graduated from a Masters in Communication and New Technologies. Held Official positions in National Council of Population and National University of Mexico. Attended an speciality on Demography in Tokio, Japan and also been active in teaching. Associated professor at National University for 28 years and now teacher of Sociological Theory at Universidad Pedagogica Nacional, where I am engaged in a research project on curricula and new technologies. Author and co Author of articles on Social Demography and Sociology of Education. Participation in international conferences on technology and education in Argentina, Uruguay and several organisations in Mexico.