Technology & Internet Use by Teachers
 

From Report #1, issued February, 1999, of Teaching, Learning and Computing: 1998, A National survey of Schools and Teachers, an NSF-funded research project of the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO).  The survey sample included approximately 4,100 teachers, 800 technology coordinators, and 850 principals from 1,150 public, private, and parochial schools, collected during January through June of 1998.
 

The Internet has begun to be established as an information and communications resource in the working and home environments of most teachers.

• Over 90% of schools now have some sort of access to the Internet, someplace in their building.
• More than one-third of U.S. teachers now have some kind of Internet access in their own classroom.
• Another 25-30% teach at schools where at least some instructional rooms in their building have LAN-based internet connectivity.
• A majority of teachers have Internet access at home and only one-quarter have not access either at home or in their classroom.

Lesson preparation.  A majority of teachers use the Internet in their effort to find information resources for use in their lessons, and more than one-quarter of all teachers report doing this on a weekly basis or more often.  However, even among teachers with both home and classroom Internet access, more teachers report only “occasional” use of the Internet for lesson preparation than report use on at least a weekly basis.

 

Professional communications.  Only 16% of teachers communicated by e-mail with teachers from other schools as often as five times during the school year.  Only 18% of teachers have begun posting information, suggestions, opinions, or student work on the World Wide Web.

The most frequent student use of the Internet is with “computer” teachers, but only between 12 and 17% of computer-subject teachers had students use the Internet for each of three purposes—e-mail, cross-classroom collaborations, and Web publishing.

 

Teachers have students use the Internet for “research,” or information gathering, more than for any other purpose; in the past two years, Web searching has become the third most common use of computers by students at school, after word processing and use of CD-ROMs.

high levels of classroom connectivity

computer expertise

constructivist pedagogy

 ...computer technology is having an emancipating effect on teachers who believe in project-based teaching and other constructivist-compatible practices.  However, changing other teachers’ philosophies and beliefs to be more constructivist simply by having them use computers in their teaching may not work.  It may be, then, that diffusion of Internet use to larger numbers of teachers will reach a barrier when most of the remaining non-participants hold beliefs that are not as compatible with Internet use as constructivism seems to be—in other words, teachers who believe in a skills-based curriculum, organized in a fixed, externally-determined sequence, and who teach a uniform aggregation of content which all students should master..
(See Becker and Ravitz, Journal of Research on Computing in Education, Summer, 1999; and Dexter, Anderson, and Becker, Journal of Research on Computing in Education, Spring, 1999)

participation in staff development

high frequency of informal contacts with other teachers

involvement in professional leadership activities

being a young teacher

not being a mathematics teacher

 

CEO Forum on Education & Technology, STaR (School Technology & Readiness) Assessment Reports, available in PDF versions.

Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO) Teaching, Learning & Computing reports and snapshots.

Mendels, Pamela, “Non-Traditional Teachers More Likely to Use the Net,” New York Times, May 26, 1999.
 
 
 
 
 

Web-Based Learning: A Librarian's Guide: Home By Carolyn Johnson email:carolyn.johnson@asu.edu