Uma nova alternativa para o uso da TV pen drive em sala de aula

Abstract

The research presented in this text seeks to attend to two demands found in my experience in the classroom. The first one is the difficulty for teachers to find and produce content to use on the TV Pen Drive, a piece of multimedia equipment provided by the government to the state schools in Paraná. This equipment has limitations in terms of accepted file formats and other terms that will be better examined in the body of the work. The second demand consists of increasing the useful life span of this device. Even though TVs Pen Drive represent one of the highest investments ever made in the state education system, and have only 10 years of use in the classroom, they are becoming obsolete and hardly used. This situation leaves an alternative with great potential of use as a technological resource in the classroom practically unused. One of the alternatives encountered, presented in this work as solution for the identified problem, was the utilization of an adaptation “kit” involving an EZcast device, a RCA converter for HDMI and a 5V cell phone charger, to transform the TV Pen Drive into a “Smart TV”. The solution provides a “wireless” connection to diverse cell phones that use the Android operational system or Windows Phones. Teachers can use their own personal cell phone to exhibit on the TV the contents such as videos, presentations, photos, live images from the cell phone’s camera, mirror the cell phone’s screen to the TV, and to access the internet, YouTube and other applications that are commonly used on cell phones. The proposed solution can therefore greatly increase the utilization of the TV Pen Drive as a resource in the classroom, helping to make the classes very dynamic and practical, qualifying the use of this device and valuing the investment that takes place in great part of the classrooms of the schools in the state education network of Paraná.