READINESS OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS TO CURRICULUM CHANGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF TEACHING INFORMATICS IN CZECH REPUBLIC

In this paper we discuss the history and current state of teaching informatics at basic schools in the Czech Republic; also we deal with the initial phase of the evaluation of the research which is focused on the content of educational subject informatics of the lower secondary education of basic schools. We are investigating the opinions of teachers concerning the readiness to curriculum changes in the educational area of informatics and communication technology of the lower secondary education of basic schools. In the context of topically planned curriculum change, our aim is to find out which of the topics that teachers go over or topics which are newly considered, experienced teachers regard as significant and should be inseparable part of teaching. The research is taking place in the connection with the existence of working (unauthorized) version of - Framework Education Programme – the part relevant to informatics and digital technologies. From the methodological point of view it was chosen a method that enable deeply pervade under the surface of solved problem and instead of usually used questionnaire research it was chosen Q – methodology. The respondents were presented cards with the themes reflecting the informatics and information and communication technologies schoolwork which in accordance with the rules of Q – methodology they sorted them from the most important to the least ones according to assigned criteria. Afterwards their answers were evaluated. This pre-research shows that informatics teachers focus the teaching mainly on learning user skills. The most favoured themes were focused on the safety in connection with the Internet, the content of office programmes (text editor and spreadsheet, programmes for giving presentations and the like) and basic computer operation. It is noteworthy that teachers do not view the teaching algorithm development and programming as the most significant part of current teaching informatics. These facts lead us to the conviction of necessity to continue the initiated research work. In accordance with the ascertained knowledge the optimization of the number q-types (cards) – the reduction from 90 to 60, went off for the need of the next exploration.