CONCIOUSNESS AND TEACHING OF FINANCIAL MATHEMATICS: AN EXPERIENCE BY USING OF DIGITAL INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

The Digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are increasingly present in the students and teachers’ life and they are considered an essential resource as a didatic support at the school environment. From this proposition, it is reasonable to infer that the ICT´s inclusion can make the Financial Mathematics classes more interesting as well as enable a practical and contextualized approach of the contents. This paper aims at finding out the main contributions performed by the technologies in the process of this school subject teaching, since the teachers are fixed to boring classes without the presence of new experiences and discoveries. Thus it is intended to work the financial education in an aware and responsible way aiming at avoiding the debt from the traps of loans and funding. Therefore, it proposes to take advantage of the financial learning moment in order to recycle the best ways to act at the time of purchase using the ICT, and proposing a more attractive comprehension. In order to reach such purposes, a field qualitative research was carried out in the period from February, 2016 to March, 2017 with the participation of students from 2nd and 3rd year high school from a small city from Minas Gerais, Brazil. To that end, two classes were drawn up: the first using the theoretical content, without the use of the digital tools, allowing to the student to have a view of how complex is the Financial Mathematics is, by means of formulas and calculations; the second one it has approached the same subjects, however using the technological tools proposed to facilitate the understanding, showing the situation in a simpler and easier comprehension way by using programmed electronic spreadsheets. As a support for the main aim, for comparative effects and to improve the understanding about how actually is the Financial Mathematics teaching in public Brazilian schools, questionnaires were applied to the high school teachers, checking which methodologies are more used. The students interest face to the classes seemed to be positive when analyzing the results. On these students, a financial awareness was developed for the accomplishment of future purchases, and they have became apt to a more critical decision-making viable to their reality, thanks to the use of the ICT. It was also noticed that relationship between the teacher and these tools goes on out of phase, mainly about their use in the teaching-learning process. It is necessary, therefore, focus on a better education for these teachers in order to explore the several technological resources currently available, making more attractive the relationship between teacher and student and satisfactory for both, allowing, thus, a more concrete and significant learning.