A Study of the Attitude of Secondary School Teachers towards the Use of Internet at School Level

Technology is generally thought of as the use of the discoveries of science. It is being used in every sphere of life. Technology has yielded many new machines, material and media which have created great potentiality and have brought revolution in the field of education. Internet is the best flower gifted by information technology. It is the latest buzzword among the computer users of the information centers now a day. Everyone, whether he is working in the field of IT (Information Technology) or not, is very anxious to know about it and use it. We are living in the age of computers. The internet has made an increasing and powerful impact upon almost every working place like-home, school, office, industries, business, sciences, education, hospital, banks, railway, airline traffic, research design, organization and society and so on. Almost all occupation and academic discipline have been profoundly affected by the internet speed for its work. Internet examines the origins of computer networking and its application to everyday problems. It focuses on the services that the internet provides and helps the reader understand their importance. It removes all the mystery and helps the reader understand how the technology works. Internet also resembles a library because it has tools that aid the search for information. In a traditional library for example, one finds a card catalog and has similar services that helps one to find information electronically. Internet is a global network of networks. A network is defined as a data communication system at various sites. A network may be composed of different combination of LAN’s (Local Area Network), MAN’s (Metropolitan Area Networks) and WAN’s (Wide Area Networks). At the simplest; a network consists of two computers or more devices with a length of wire between them, facilitating communication. The internet is the name for a vast; worldwide system consisting of people, information and computers. It is the result of the technological advancement that has enabled virtually all computers to be network together. Internet is a worldwide computers network that contains a large collection of information which could be made available to the computer. The person having internet connection can retrieve any information of individual interest. Internet is the largest and most complete learning tool for a group of people with varied educational backgrounds and interests. Teachers, students, businessmen and other educators can share ideas instantly across vast distances. It is useful for scientific and research community. Through internet scientist can gain and enjoy instant access to the world’s most advanced research facilities and discuss their research problems with others when working in the same field. For business community, internet is the common place where they can discuss and set the business deals without moving from their place. A network based on standards including Internet Protocol (IP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and the Domain Name System (DNS), which enables global communications between all connected computing devices. It provides the platform for web services and the Worldwide Web.

A sample is an essential part of all the scientific procedures. Sample is a small proportion of a from which it was selected. It is necessary that a sample should be a true representative of the population. According to Good (1952) - “a sample is a miniature population”. To be true, sample must be representative of a population and must be adequate in number; there are two basic requirements for sampling procedure to fulfill. It is physically impossible to work with the total population in a systematic way. Moreover, to work on a sample saves time, energy and money. Keeping in view the limited resources of time investigator selected a small sample than selecting whole universe for his research study. But the success of sampling depends upon the fact that sample should be true representative of whole population. The sample of the present study was selected from school teachers teaching at school level in Gwalior district. Hence 100 school teachers teaching languages, social science and physical Education were selected for the present study. Distribution of sample is shown in table 1.

The selection of the suitable instruments for tools is of vital importance for collection of data and it depends upon various considerations such as objective of the study, the amount of time at the disposal of the investigator, availability of suitable test, scoring procedure and easiness to interpret the test results and the like. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, a questionnaire which was developed by Umeet Singh (2006) was used. In the beginning 43 items were experts and trying out the questionnaire, finally 32 items were retained.

In order to assess the attitude of the teachers at school level towards internet the Questionnaire was administrated on the school teachers. The researcher contacts them personally. Questionnaires were distributed to them and were collected back after half an hour. The school teachers were told that present questionnaire would not affect them and their responses would be kept strictly confidential.

In this scoring procedure, Likert’s method of scoring the attitude scale was adopted. In the present questionnaire item No. 1 to 26 are positive statements and items from 27 to 32 are negative statements. The procedure of scoring the positive and the negative statements are given below:

The score was calculated according to the above mentioned tables. Used Statistical Techniques: To analyses and interpretation of data the following statistical techniques were used: Frequently distribution Percentage of score was calculated. The measure of centre tendency (Arithmetic mean)

t-ratios were calculated.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION:-

It can be observed from the table 4 that attitude of male and female school teachers towards internet is found to have means scores 122.04 and 121.67. The S.D. of male and female are 9.52 and 9.24 respectively. The “t” ratio between these two groups comes out to be 0.26 which is insignificant at 0.05 level of significance. It indicates that male and female school teachers at school level have similar attitude towards internet. Hence hypothesis No. 1 that there exists no significant difference between the attitude of male and female school teachers towards internet is accepted.

found to have means scores 123.30 and 121.13 and the S.D. of rural and urban are 7.51 and 10.27 respectively. The “t” ratio between these two groups comes out to be 1.72 which is insignificant at 0.05 level of significance. It indicates that there is no significant difference between the mean attitude scores of rural and urban school teachers towards internet. Hence hypothesis No. 2 that there exists no significant difference between the attitude of rural and urban is accepted.

It can be observed from the table 6 that attitude of school teachers teaching physical Education and social science are found to have means scores 121.76 and 120.76 and the S.D. of physical education and social science are 9.63 and 10.32 respectively. The “t” ratio between these two groups comes out to be 0.46 which is insignificant at 0.05 level of significance. It indicates that there is no significant difference between the mean attitude of physical education and social science teachers towards internet. Hence hypothesis No. 3 that there exists no significant difference between the attitude of physical education and social science school teachers towards internet is accepted.

It can be observed from the table 7 that attitude of school teachers teaching languages and physical education are found to have means scores 122.39 and 121.76 and the S.D. of languages and physical education are 8.92 and 9.63 respectively. The “t” ratio between these two groups comes out to be 0.42 which is insignificant at 0.05 level of significance. It indicates that there is no significant difference between the mean attitude of languages and physical education school teachers towards internet. Hence hypothesis No. 4 that there exists no significant difference between the attitude of languages and physical education teacher educators towards internet is accepted.

It can be observed from the table 8 that attitude of school teachers teaching languages and social science are found to have means scores 122.39 and 120.76 and the S.D. of languages and social science are 8.92 and 10.32 respectively. The “t” ratio between these two groups comes out to be 0.82 which is insignificant at 0.05 level of significance. science school teachers towards internet. Hence hypothesis No. 5 that there exists no significant difference between the attitude of languages and social science school teachers towards internet is accepted.

a. Internet allocates learning resources to individual and groups. b. Internet helps the teacher educators to collect education related information from outside world. c. The teacher educators can give the educational information with the help of E-mail, on computer. d. Internet provides direct interaction between teacher educators and subject matter to be learned. e. Internet engages the teacher educators in tutorial interaction and dialogue. f. Internet provides easy access to files of information for reference and guidance. g. Internet can be used as supplement to traditional instructional methods. h. Internet can be used to replace the traditional classroom lecture.

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