O uso das TIC como ferramenta de ensino nos cursos de Odontologia no Brasil.

Abstract

The incorporation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) may help improve the teaching process by to allowing students and professors to have more interaction and encourage independent learning. This study had three main objectives: to verify the use of websites as a complementary teaching tool in dental schools courses within Brazil; to investigate whether the content found in online searches for head and neck anatomy, using the Google®, is linked to the official webpages of dental schools in Brazil; and to evaluate the presence and use of ICT as a histology teaching tool in dental schools in the Midwest (MW), Northeast (NE), South (S) and Southeast (SE) regions of Brazil. Using the registered addresses in the database of National Institute of Educational Studies and Research the websites of dental schools in Brazil were accessed and analyzed to evaluate the use of ICT in teaching. Then using the keywords: "head and neck anatomy", "facial anatomy," "dental anatomy", "dentistry anatomy" were performed successive searches via Google® of which the first twenty results for each search were considered. Simultaneously an online questionnaire, about the use of ICT in education, it was sent to the responsible professors for the histology discipline in MW, NE, S and SE regions of Brazil. It was observed that of the 226 dental schools, 202 had dental website, however, only 21 had open website courses for any user. It was verified that most of the websites belonged to the courses categorized as Dental Sciences (56%), then Biological Sciences and Health (29%) and Social and Human Sciences (15%). It was found a higher number of websites in the Southeast region and that the public schools produced repositories, unlike the private ones where reference is the most common template of website (p <0.01). Three websites of anatomy courses were found, but, when an open search was conducted by Google®, none of these websites was located. For the histology course were found 18 websites: presenting ICT as figures (30.3%), professor‟s e-mail (30.3%), texts (9.3%), questionnaires (7.0%), hypertext (4.6%), lesson (4.6%), videos (4.6%) and other tools (9.3%). It regards to the questionnaires that were sent to the histology professors, only 8.8% were answered, of these, only one professor had an open website and five professors have ensured restricted website only to their students. The other 12 professors, despite of do not have a course website, they considered ICT as important teaching tools for educational support. It was concluded that the dental schools in Brazil have underused ICT as complementary teaching material.