About the portuguese reality of ICT in education

Abstract

This special issue of Interactive Educational Multimedia is entirely dedicated to Portugal. Its main purpose is to contribute to the understanding about what is going on in this country in what concerns the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the educational context. As generally in all the UE countries the interest showed by the educational national authorities in Portugal about ICT is very high. In general, following the European directives and, more recently, pursuing the strategic goals to be attained by 2010 as defined by the Lisbon European Council held in March 2000. The main interest of the researcher is to understand at what level the policy and the official discourse is translated in concrete measures that allow an effective and regular use of ICT in the activities promoted at the school level, and if those measures are, in fact, a factor of innovation of the teaching and learning processes (Papert, 1993, 1996) and an important impulse of society development in general, values many times proclaimed but not always fulfilled (Cuban, 1993, 2001; Salomon, 2002).