Information system to promote reading literacy — Letrinhas

The acquisition of reading skills is decisive for the academic achievement of elementary school students. However, unlike other domains of human development, learning to read is a complex process. With this in mind, several attempts have been made to find new educational strategies to foster students reading motivation. That is the context in which Letrinhas appears. Considering the enormous potential of information and communication technologies for education and training, particularly mobile devices, we have developed a digital repository of teaching and learning materials and a multiplatform application that runs on mobile devices. This information system is designed to promote learning and the development of reading in students of the first and second cycles of elementary education and provide teachers with tools for monitoring and assessing reading skills against the curricular targets set by the Ministry of Education. This is no doubt a basic need that is not being met by the applications currently available in the market. The performance of Letrinhas was evaluated by specialists and users in a pilot group and a high level of satisfaction was observed among students and teachers as time and effort spent to consolidate reading is considerably reduced with this application.