Schools, families and communities interwave complex and multifaceted relations and are in a process of reconfiguration (Stoer & Silva, 2005). Home-school relations, as any other, are power relations and have the potentiality of leading to a true partnership or, on the other end of the spectrum, to its opposite, an open conflict. This means that the relationship among schools, families and their communities might turn out to be a way of social and cultural reproduction, very often through subtle ways that prevent many people of being aware of it (Lightfoot, 1978; Lareau, 1989; David, 1993; Vincent, 1996; Silva, 2003). Theorizing this relationship as one among cultures (Silva, 2003) - i.e., a relation between the local culture(s) and the school culture (this one characterized by Bourdieu and other sociologists as representing and legitimizing an urban, written, middle class one) - is a way of pointing to that possibility; thus, of avoiding that reproduction. The structurally unequal relationship between schools and families, depending on factors such as social class, gender and ethnicity (Lightfoot, 1978; Lareau, 1989; David, 1993; Vincent, 1996; Silva, 2003), stresses the importance of ICT as eventually playing a mediation role between the "two worlds" (Silva, Coelho, Fernandes and Viana, 2010), and highlights the possibility of perverse effects of public policies in this area, as well. These and other questions begin to be considered by several experts, even though there is still a deficit of research in this area, which seems, however, to be a promising one (Pieri, 2005; Wiedemann, 2003, Martinez-Gonzalez et al., 2003, 2005; Diogo & Silva, 2010; Silva et al., 2010).

One of the problems of the so-called information society - of which Europe is, in general, a good example - refers to inequalities and power relations that underlie it, something known by different labels such as digital gap, info-exclusion and digital divide. Mostly, what appears to be concerned is the gap between two opposing groups: those with and those without access to ICT. However, the question goes beyond the access one: we should address its uses, too.

In this paper we will address the results from a sociological research on the uses and effects, school and social, of the Magalhães computer[1] in an administrative group of schools in Leiria, Portugal. We will focus on how information and communication technology can become a bridge among different sociocultural groups or, on the contrary, can contribute to the reproduction of social inequalities.

This concern is part of a broader research, which, originally, aimed at finding answers to multiple questions, including: who uses the Magalhães computer? What are its uses? In what contexts? What are the modes of regulation of its uses? By whom? What are the effects, school and social, of its uses by the various social actors and their interactions? In particular, in the classroom and in the school-family relationship?  

[1] The Magalhães computer is the result of a government policy that distributed a laptop specially conceived for elementary children, at a national level, for a very low price or even free for poor families. This mediatic and controversial program started in the school year of 2008-2009.

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