| Summary |
In May of 1993, Governor Jim Hunt released a plan for a first-of-its-kind information highway which would connect every school, hospital, state and county office by fiber optic cabling. This initiative has promised public schools access to vast amounts of information delivered to them at record speeds via advanced telecommunication technologies. The Internet, one such advanced technology is already in place in many schools and becomes more ubiquitous to the teacher workplace every day. Access to information technology will change curriculum in ways that place an emphasis on depth in student learning. Information access allows teachers to tap into electronic communication networks to trade assignments, coordinate student projects, plan and attend workshops, gather information, collaborate with other professionals, and ask expert advice. Research has demonstrated that some teachers who had training, support, and access to equipment in their classrooms employed telecommunication technologies while others did not. This research was developed to study the phenomena of Internet adoption in a middle school setting. Individual case studies were developed and consisted of open ended interviews with eight teachers who had participated in staff development aimed at integrating the Internet into the classroom curriculum. Interviews with teachers centered around gathering data on circumstances that either encouraged or created barriers for teachers employing the Internet in their classroom. A review of relevant literature provided the factors that were examined and analyzed as to why a teacher would adopt the Internet into their teaching strategies. These factors included belief in computer utility, computer efficacy, staff development, technical orientation of curriculum, classroom autonomy, technology access, collegiality, collaboration, willingness to innovate, and principal leadership. The data collected from the interviews with the teachers were analyzed using content analysis to identify common patterns and themes. In this study classroom autonomy, collegiality, and computer technology access were the main factors that determined why one teacher choose to use the Internet and the others did not. |
