[Experience of nursing education in collective health: informatics used to teach epidemiologic surveillance]

This article discusses the application of information technology (IT) in education, its benefits and the ethical and ideological implications in using this tool in nursing education and work. It relates the experience of developing contents on epidemiological surveillance. Some pedagogical experiences were given to the students handling an Aids database, with the purpose of motivating them to express their understanding and to reflect on the health problems of the population, associating the occurrence and the profiles of this epidemic in different areas of the city of São Paulo, with the forms of work and life of population groups in certain places. The understanding of the health-disease process was enlarged. IT is a potent instrument in epidemiological surveillance for the teacher who act as mediator between the information and the knowledge that one wants to build.