Educommunication Through a Teacher Guided Mobile Application, Ecuador

Abstract

Digital technologies have reshaped the way adolescents access information, interact with content and construct
meaning, yet many rural classrooms in Latin America still rely
almost exclusively on transmissive teaching. This paper reports a
mixed methods study on the incidence of a teacher guided mobile
application, designed under an educommunication framework,
on the learning of Language and Literature among eighth grade
students of basic education at Unidad Educativa Moraspungo,
Pangua canton, Ecuador, during the October to December 2024
school period. Eighty students, split evenly between two parallel
classes, completed a structured survey addressing functionality,
navigation, interface design, content comprehension, perceived
learning gains, motivation, quality of teacher guidance, usefulness
of embedded exercises, satisfaction with interactive learning and
perceived improvement in oral and written expression. Semi
structured interviews with the school principal, an ICT teacher
and a Language and Literature teacher complemented the
quantitative data, together with participant observation during
classroom sessions. Results show near unanimous positive perceptions: 100% of respondents reported stable functionality, clear
and attractive design, improved comprehension of curricular
topics and higher learning compared with conventional lessons,
while 98.7% considered navigation easy. Interviewees valued the
pedagogical contribution of the tool and identified connectivity,
device access, teacher training, richer animations and additional
interactive reading and writing exercises as improvement areas.
The findings support the claim that mobile technology, when
mediated by deliberate teacher orchestration and grounded in
dialogic communication, can strengthen engagement, comprehension and communicative competence in literacy education within
resource constrained rural contexts