E-LEARNING CONTINUING EDUCATION OF TEACHERS IN A BRAZILIAN INSTITUTION

The continuing education of teachers occurs throughout their professional life in the school environment. There are many possible contributions to this process, and most teachers seek updating and learning of new methods for their pedagogical improvement. The fast changes in social, political, cultural and economic global scenario impose actualization as a key to follow knowledge evolution. On the other hand, new educational demands emerge as a consequence of technological development and its popularization. Students are often better habilitated to the use of new technologies than their teachers, and the use of technology in the classroom may be a powerful pedagogic tool if properly used. This study describes several courses of continued education for teachers developed at a Brazilian institution witch has a partnership with public universities at Rio de Janeiro State. All the courses are e-learning based. The e-learning is especially adequate for teachers, considering their necessity of flexible schedules, and also their technology appropriation needs. The courses use methods that include contents review, tutored on line debates, as well as classroom activities development and application and evaluation. They are based on the state curriculum and mainly focused on classroom practice, providing tools for teachers to improve their practice quality. Ten thousand teachers have gone through these continued education courses. Our results indicate the performance of these teachers’ students is higher than the performance of students of others teachers in the State. The State of Rio de Janeiro presented the best growth rate in student flows of the country from 2011 to 2012. Census data released by the National Institute for Educational Studies Anísio Teixeira (Inep) shows that the schools of the state have been approving more students and showing a decrease of classroom failure and abandonment rates in recent years. The national classification of state high schools rose more than six percentage points, passing from the 25th in 2011 to the 13th position in 2012, approaching the national average. Another trend observed was the decrease in failure and dropout rates in high school, which had the second most significant improvement between the units of the federation. Repetition rates of the state decreased by 3.8% and dropout, 2.8%. These numbers point out that teachers’ qualification is an important component in the improvement of educational system.