Abstract:

Students are growing increasingly familiar with digital technologies such as smartphones and tablets. Applications (Apps) installed in these devices help approach more abstract contents, such as those that compose nature sciences. The use of Apps to organize information – which makes it possible to create “notes” – may be an alternative to the laboratory experiment notebooks. The creation of “notes” that will compose digital laboratory notebooks may help students to collect, record and organize the experimental data more efficiently, besides contributing to digital fluency and broadening knowledge on Chemistry. In this context the application of digital technologies can contribute to the teaching and learning processes in Chemistry. The Apps to organize information can be easily adapted for use in various contexts. These Apps enable taking quick notes, drawing, taping audios and taking photos, maintaining and organizing all these resources in a same note. The use of digital technologies by the teacher as a support tool encourages study and interaction among the students. The Apps that enable creating notes are an alternative that provides differentiated resources, such as storage and sharing in the “cloud” as compared to the traditional notes taken on paper, which constitute the “laboratory notebooks”. Considering this scenario, the objective of this study was to identify Apps to organize information to create notes and its possible contributions to the processes of teaching and learning Chemistry. For this a search was performed in the digital stores: “App Store” and “Play Store”, utilizing the keywords: “notebook”, “digital notebook” and “notes”. Thirty-nine Apps, all of them free, were analyzed, 12 of which were selected because they were supported by the “Android” and “iOS” operational systems.

The following functionalities of the 12 Apps selected were analyzed: photos (capturing photos), video (taping videos), audio (taping and or reproducing audio), PDF (opening PDF files), writing (writing free hand), attach (attaching .doc and .pdf images and documents), synchronizing (synchronizing automatically among all of the devices accessed by the user), sharing (sharing, via email, cloud or social networks, directly from the Application), and also, whether they had a mobile interface and PC. After analyzing the functionalities offered by the Apps, they were classified in three categories: “Basic Functionalities”, “Moderate Functionalities”, and “High Functionalities”, corresponding respectively to the Apps that had from one to three, four to six and at least seven of the functionalities described above. An activity utilizing Apps was developed to organize information in a Chemistry classroom. The Apps selected will be utilized to subsidize the elaboration of further didactic proposals within the sphere of activities performed in Chemistry laboratories mediated by digital technologies.

Acknowledgements:
Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Sul (IFRS), FAPERGS.

Keywords:

Apps, smartphones, tablets, chemistry education.