Educational platforms: Uses and challenges in the post-digital school. A study in secondary schools of the City of Buenos Aires

Abstract

Based on a study carried out in four schools in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, in this article we inquire about the uses of institutional and corporate educational platforms made by teachers. We also review the assemblages that are configured in schools when we contemplate the coexistence between platforms, networks, applications, along with other devices that have made up the school infrastructure for a longer time, such as records in printed format. To carry out this study, we adopted an ethnographic perspective capable of accounting for the phenomena of the post-digital scenario in its situated dimension, in tension and always more opaque and changing than what some antecedents of the field presume. To investigate the practices and evaluations that teachers propose in relation to the digital platforms that are used daily in school, we have used instances of observation and class registration, interviews with teachers from different disciplines, and exercises walkthrough. In this way, and as a general objective, we propose to contribute to the discussion about the place of digital technologies in education and the impacts that the uses of digital commercial platforms have on schools.