Abstract:

Rurality in developing countries still have significant challenges for minimizing economic, political and infrastructural gap in comparison with urban context. In this continuous problems the lack of technological resources and connectivity are still present. Nevertheless, as part of the social and educational dynamics of knowledge society, various studies have reported the interest of rural teachers on the integration of ICT on their teaching practices concerning the use of resources they have on the rural schools they work at.

Studies about teachers’ mobile device use in rural context have been mainly focus on the ways they interact with multimedia resources, internet, computer and mobile devices for the developments of tasks inside the classroom. The possibilities of accessing to different resources and mobile applications propose a perspective of teachers in rurality from the prosumer role who creates his own contents for specific scenarios. This paper uses the concept of prosumer to understand how the rural teacher interacts with digital resources for consuming and creating educational contents on the web.

The study was compose by a sample of 241 teachers of multigrade rural schools. The selected teachers worked on schools, which operate under New School educational model from first to fifth grade of elementary school. It was inquired the type of educational contents published on the web such as Blogs, articles, podcasts, pedagogical resources, videos, wikis and websites. In addition, it was asked for teachers authorship concerning of such contents. Findings suggest there is a relationship between teachers’ age and their level of education with their educational content publishing on the web. Besides, it showed that most part of teachers have not published content of any type. On the other hand, the amount of teachers who have published content are mainly prosumers.

Keywords:

Mobile, prosumer, rural, teacher.