Introducing New Technology in Educational Contexts: Schools as Organizations

Abstract

The school context offers many opportunities to explore the use of digital technologies. When designing for schools, systems designers usually tend to consider only the students or, at most, teachers and students. However, schools are complex social organizations that are composed by many other interested parties. When aiming at solutions that make sense to the users, the entire school, as an organization, should be considered. This paper, presents the activities we conducted at an elementary public school in Brazil, facing the challenge of constructing meaning for a new digital artifact. For the analysis of organization and context we used adapted practices from Organizational Semiotics (OS) and Participatory Design (PD). Our results suggest that both OS and PD are suitable for educational projects and they can anticipate problems and propose solutions for prospective use of technology in such contexts.