The teaching and learning process have been deeply challegend by the lockdown neeeded in times of COVID-19. Here I want to describe how my local community is dealing with these changes and develop a reflexion about how much of a multimodality teaching process has actually improved the children learning process.

Fisrt of all, I have to describe some things, in order to explain the general context me and my students live in. We live in a small northeastern city, which is marked by the main presence of trade. The families do not have many incomes and many of them don't have computers at home, only smartphones.Some of them don't have broadband internet.

As we began the lockdown in 18th March - we already have one month and two days of lockdown - soon the school management team made contact with anITC professional who built a MOODLE platform for us. They made calls to explain to the teachers how to use it, how to post activities, link videos, put images and texts. Many teachers in the beginning thought that this process would be painful and hard to get used to. This is a real example of how many people are not working in a multimodal way - I believe a teacher can be multimodal using handwriting, manual posters, singing songs or dancing. But it is known that digital technology enhance the multimodality ways of teaching and learning. 

So, we were working with MOODLE, which is a pretty good platform, it has all the tools the teachers needed to give classes and share the student's activities.

However, in the middle of the process, the parents were having much trouble in accessing the platform and getting the activities. So, we decided to integrate the WhatsApp web along. Groups were formed, and there we could have a more intimate approximation with both the students and the parents. At this point, we are still posting the activities in the MOODLE platform, because it is more formal and the school paid for that domain, but the connection and interaction with the public is being done mainly thorugh WhatsApp.

In conclusion, now I firmly believe the education could only get to its object - the students - throught these two online sites of multimodal communication.These were not only useful, but needed to our work fluency. Alll of us, teachers, students and parents, the community as a team, learned and are learning, in a continuous process, how to migrate from the traditional literacy to the synaesthetic, multimodal ways of meaning making.

https://moodle.org/

https://web.whatsapp.com/